Comment by blueflow

> The wording "executes the given command" would generally not imply "I'll just throw it at $SHELL and see what happens".

"command" means exactly that. Evaluation by shell. With that in mind, the manual page should read less ambiguous to you.

I actually don't have a good source for that, but you can check the execve(2) manpage. If command would refer to the execution of an argument vector, it would have been mentioned in there.

The other meaning of "command" refers to specific programs like those in /bin.