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POPowerShell stripping double quotes from command line arguments
 

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    <p>Recently I have been having some trouble using GnuWin32 from PowerShell whenever double quotes are involved.</p> <p>Upon further investigation, it appears PowerShell is stripping double quotes from command line arguments, even when properly escaped.</p> <pre class="lang-none prettyprint-override"><code>PS C:\Documents and Settings\Nick&gt; echo '"hello"' "hello" PS C:\Documents and Settings\Nick&gt; echo.exe '"hello"' hello PS C:\Documents and Settings\Nick&gt; echo.exe '\"hello\"' "hello" </code></pre> <p>Notice that the double quotes are there when passed to PowerShell's <strong>echo</strong> cmdlet, but when passed as an argument to <strong>echo.exe</strong>, the double quotes are stripped unless escaped with a backslash (even though PowerShell's escape character is a backtick, not a backslash).</p> <p>This seems like a bug to me. If I am passing the correct escaped strings to PowerShell, then PowerShell should take care of whatever escaping may be necessary for however it invokes the command.</p> <p>What is going on here?</p> <p>For now, the fix is to escape command line arguments in accordance with these rules (which seem to be used by the <code>CreateProcess</code> API call which PowerShell uses to invoke .exe files): </p> <ul> <li>To pass a double quote, escape with a backslash: <code>\"</code> -> <code>"</code></li> <li>To pass a one or more backslashes followed by a double quote, escape each backslash with another backslash and escape the quote: <code>\\\\\"</code> -> <code>\\"</code></li> <li>If not followed by a double quote, no escaping is necessary for backslashes: <code>\\</code> -> <code>\\</code></li> </ul> <p>Note that further escaping of double quotes may be necessary to escape the double quotes in the Windows API escaped string to PowerShell.</p> <p>Here are some examples, with <strong>echo.exe</strong> from GnuWin32:</p> <pre class="lang-none prettyprint-override"><code>PS C:\Documents and Settings\Nick&gt; echo.exe "\`"" " PS C:\Documents and Settings\Nick&gt; echo.exe "\\\\\`"" \\" PS C:\Documents and Settings\Nick&gt; echo.exe "\\" \\ </code></pre> <p>I imagine that this can quickly become hell if you need to pass a complicated command line parameter. Of course, none of this documented in the <code>CreateProcess()</code> or PowerShell documentation.</p> <p>Also note that this is not necessary to pass arguments with double quotes to .NET functions or PowerShell cmdlets. For that, you need only escape your double quotes to PowerShell.</p>
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    1. COwhat version of powershell are you using? v1 was a hell of a lot worse with quotes. v2 is much better but still suffers. v2 ships with win7+2008r2 but is installable on 2003/xp too.
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    2. COThis is with v2.
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    3. COI consider it a bug, but PS is not stripping the quotes. As you found out in your last example, PS is simply failing to escape quotes when executing the application.
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