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Asked: 2026-05-20T04:34:02+00:00

In some automated tests I put double-quotes around every command given to an executable,

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In some automated tests I put double-quotes around every command given to an executable, e.g.

notepad "hello.txt"

This works correctly. Also if I try the same with other executables this always seem to work. However, the following doesn’t work on Windows 7:

cmd.exe "/c" "echo hello"

The problem isn’t the quotes around “echo hello”, but it doesn’t seem to like the quotes around the /c option. All I get is the following output:

'"echo hello' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

Is cmd.exe handled differently by Windows?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    “hello.txt” is a filename, and in general you only quote filenames/paths (and other parameters that might contain spaces)

    And yes, cmd.exe probably has some special handling, you can use /S to change the quote handling.

    IMHO “/c” is bad practice anyway, it looks like you want to execute c.exe at the root of the current drive

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