Passing arguments from a file to a bash script

Assuming each line of arguments.txt represents a separate argument, with bash 4 you can read arguments.txt into an array using mapfile (each line from the file goes in as an array element, in sequence) and then pass the array to the command

mapfile -t <arguments.txt
source test.sh "${MAPFILE[@]}"

The advantage is that splitting on spaces embedded inside lines is avoided

With lower versions of bash

IFS=$'\n' read -ra arr -d '' <arguments.txt
source test.sh "${arr[@]}"

You can do this with awk. For example:

arguments=`awk '{a = $1 " " a} END {print a}' arguments.txt`

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Edit after reading your comment:

arguments=`awk '{i = 0; while(i<=NF){i++; a = a " "$i}} END {print a}'