The first thing to understand in this process is how ssh handles its arguments. I don't mean the arguments to the thing you're trying to run, but arguments of ssh. When you invoke ssh, the arguments after the remote host specification (user@server) are concatenated together, and passed through the shell on the remote end. This is important to note, as just because your arguments are properly split on the local side, does not mean they will be properly split on the remote side.
To use your example:
ssh user@server 'echo "hello $1"' sh "world"
These arguments get concatenated as the command:
echo "hello $1" sh world
This is why you get
hello sh world
The double space between hello and sh is because that's where $1 was supposed to go, but there is no $1.
As another example, without the $1, is:
ssh user@server echo "foo bar" baz
Which results in the output:
foo bar baz
This is because the arguments are being concatenated together, so you end up with the command:
echo foo bar baz
Since there is no way to get around the command being passed through a shell, you just have to ensure that what you passed can survive the shell evaluation. The way I usually accomplish this is with printf "%q "
For example:
cmd=(echo "foo bar" baz)
ssh user@server "$(printf "%q " "${cmd[@]}")"
Which results in the output:
foo bar baz
While it's cleaner and easier to understand with cmd being a separate var, it's not required. The following works just the same:
ssh user@server "$(printf "%q " echo "foo bar" baz)"
This also works fine with your shell argument example:
cmd=(sh -c 'echo 1="<$1>" 2="<$2>" 3="<$3>"' sh "my arg1" "my arg2" "my arg3")
ssh user@server "$(printf "%q " "${cmd[@]}")"
Which results in the output:
1=<my arg1> 2=<my arg2> 3=<my arg3>
As an alternative solution, you can pass your command as a complete shell script. For example:
ssh user@server <<'EOF'
sh -c 'echo 1="<$1>" 2="<$2>" 3="<$3>"' sh "my arg1" "my arg2" "my arg3"
EOF
There are drawbacks to this solution though as it's harder to do programmatically (generating the doc to pass on STDIN). Also because you're using STDIN, if you want the script on the remote side to read STDIN, you can't (at least not without some trickery).
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