How to make Paramiko use PowerShell by default?

Question

I'm SSHing to a Windows machine with Paramiko and I'm stressed out by how hard it is to write a command because:

exec_command runs in cmd prompt console, which has limited functionality so I need PowerShell, meaning I should prefix the command with pwsh -c "the command"
However, cmd prompt doesn't support multi-line nor multiple commands naturally, so I need to stick in caret ^s and &&s in the command.
Inside the command I'm calling Python with python -c 'print("hello")\nprint("world")', however I'm already using " for pwsh -c "the command" meaning I need to escape it with backticks `".

This is fiendishly complex and ugly, the code is a mess, it's Python and PowerShell and cmd prompt special characters intertwined at once. I'm almost 100% sure I'm missing something and there is an easier way to do it hence I'm asking whether Paramiko can run do exec_command in PowerShell by default.

Technically, nested double quotes would require escaping for cmd.exe to pass, which means those should be escaped using backward slashes, i.e. pwsh -c "python -c 'print(\"hello\")\nprint(\"world\")'". — Compo
– Compo, Commented Jun 6, 2022 at 22:17

Martin Prikryl · Accepted Answer · 2022-06-07 07:15:51Z

1

The client (Paramiko) has no control over how the command is interpreted. It's about the server.

Windows Win32-OpenSSH definitely can use PowerShell as the default shell.

answered Jun 7, 2022 at 7:15

Martin Prikryl

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Alex Deft Over a year ago

Microsoft should just cull cmd, its simply lame and vastly inferior.

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