CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windowspowershellspecial-characters
learner
learner

Reputation: 103

Escape special chars in powershell commands

I am new to powershell, but I am facing a very basic problem. When I am running the following command powershell complains. It seems to have issues with the special chars: [*, =, &, <, >]. Any ideas how do I escape them ? This is powershell version 2. [I am using winexe to run the powershell command from a linux box. If I copy paste the ps command it seems to work fine, but remotely running it cause powershell to complain.]

winexe "cmd /c echo . | powershell Set-ExecutionPolicy bypass -Force -Scope CurrentUser;C:\test.ps1  -name 'B*=&<+>%N' -extra_logging '0' "

dos charset 'CP850' unavailable - using ASCII The string starting: At line:1 char:106 + Set-ExecutionPolicy bypass -Force -Scope CurrentUser;C:\test.ps1 -lun <<<< 'B*= is missing the terminator: '. At line:1 char:110 + Set-ExecutionPolicy bypass -Force -Scope CurrentUser;C:\test.ps1 -lun 'B*= <<<< + CategoryInfo : ParserError: (B*=:String) [], ParentContainsErro rRecordException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : TerminatorExpectedAtEndOfString

The system cannot find the file specified. The system cannot find the file specified.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2404

Answers (2)

Carl Carlson
Carl Carlson

Reputation: 888

I could be wrong, but I believe it is the backwards apostrophe or the grave symbol, i.e. `

Upvotes: 0

Harry Johnston
Harry Johnston

Reputation: 36348

The problem isn't powershell but the regular command shell. Making a reasonable assumption about what winexe does, the relevant part of the command is

cmd /c echo . | powershell Set-ExecutionPolicy bypass -Force -Scope CurrentUser;C:\test.ps1 -name 'B*=&<+>%N' -extra_logging '0'

which contains some special characters interpreted by the command shell. Content in single quotes is not considered to be quoted, so you'll need to explicitly quote them. Just to make life difficult, because you're using piping, the characters are processed twice so you'll need to double-quote:

cmd /c echo . | powershell Set-ExecutionPolicy bypass -Force -Scope CurrentUser;C:\test.ps1 -name 'B*=^^^&^^^<+^^^>^%N' -extra_logging '0'

The caret makes the command shell take the following character literally.

Or, if it so happens winexe passes the command it is given to the command shell rather than executing it directly, you might need to triple-quote, i.e., seven carets before each special character.

Upvotes: 3

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