Properly escape a string variable that contains special characters to be used in a shell script?

I feel dumb for asking such a simple question but Im absolutely stuck on this one. I've search everywhere, tried several methods to escape or properly quote this variable, but no matter what when I run this in a shell script I get the following error: stat: cannot statx 'This is an odd | filename | (name).m4a' : No such file or directory The file exists in the directory this is being run at. #!/bin/bash FILENAME="This is an odd | filename | (name).m4a" FILESIZE=$(stat "%s" "$FILENAME") echo "Size of $FILENAME = $FILESIZE bytes." When I run this on the commandline it works just fine: $ stat "%s" 'This is an odd | filename | (name).m4a'