my best guess: system("bash -c 'echo \\\"¯\\\\_(ツ)_/¯\\\"'");

which will get parsed as: bash -c 'echo \"¯\\_(ツ)_/¯\"'

which will run: echo "¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

and since echo just prints whatever was given to it, it’ll print "¯\_(ツ)_/¯" with the quotes

I decided to throw my PC in the composter and become a gardener

That was actually the first line of C I’ve ever written so there’s no way I’m guessing the right number of escapes, but I guess I’d cheat by finding the value of each char and printing those one at a time.