@dhylands sorry for the late response on this, I'm not able to understand the issue with the quotes. What exactly do you mean by check if the variable is already quoted? if the user passes something like 
```
$ ./set-pref "preference.name.one"
```
Then the shell does not treat the quotes as literals when echoing.
```bash
echo ${pref_name}
echo "${pref_name}"
echo $pref_name
```
all seem to give the same result, none of them include literal quotes in the output and extra quotes around the variable name also do not seem to affect the output.
Could you please clarify this issue?