Question

I’m trying something really simple here, but can’t figure out where I’m going wrong. I’ve found many other useful discussions of this – particularly here – but haven’t found anything that covers my specific scenario.

In powershell, I have typed the following:

$path = "c:\program files\"
$path2 = "c:\program files\fred2\"
echoargs $path $path2
echoargs "$path" "$path2"

In both calls to echoargs, I get

Arg 0 is <c:\program files" c:\program>
Arg 1 is <files\fred2">

back as the result. How can I get the parameters to be passed through correctly?

NB: In my real script the path variables are built up from a few config parameters, so I can’t just pass them directly in single quotes.

Answer 1

You need to enclose your result strings in single quotes inside the scope of the execution:

echoargs "'$path'" "'$path2'"

This will pass them to the called application delimited inside single quotes, but since the entire string is still in double quotes your parameter will be expanded correctly.