How do I pass raw strings to commands through the command line in PowerShell?

Question

Our IT department is moving to Windows 8 and everyone is starting to use PowerShell as their default windows command line environment rather than the cmd.exe.

Unfortunately PowerShell evaluates the things you type in it and it's quite hard to pass raw command line arguments to programs.

For example I've a program inventory.exe that takes a special string that formats its output. I can't pass this special string in PowerShell as I get a mysterious error:

PS C:\Users\Administrator> inventory.exe 'inventory "," date "," owner'
inventory.exe error: No comma allowed

I assume that PowerShell evaluated the 'inventory "," date "," owner' string somehow and something else was passed to inventory.exe program as a result it printed an error.

This program works ok in cmd.exe:

C:\Documents and Settings\boda> inventory.exe 'inventory "," date "," owner'
... (the output that I expect) ...

It even gets worse if I type characters such as %, $ in PowerShell.

Does anyone know how to pass raw strings to commands in PowerShell?

manojlds · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-12 12:43:03Z

8

If you are using Powershell v3.0, there is a new syntax to make Powershell avoid any extra parsing for arguments. Something like:

inventory.exe --% 'inventory', 'date', 'owner'

There are other approaches as mentioned here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/josebda/archive/2012/03/03/using-windows-powershell-to-run-old-command-line-tools-and-their-weirdest-parameters.aspx

answered Aug 12, 2013 at 12:43

manojlds

303k66 gold badges482 silver badges426 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

How do I pass raw strings to commands through the command line in PowerShell?

1 Answer 1

Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related