Question

Program A(cmd.exe \C) (Takes 1 argument)

Program B: (Takes 1 or more arguments)

C1,C2,C3, … : A list of agruments

If I type A B C1 C2 C3 in cmd prompt,
The desired interpretation is

A (B (C1 C2 C3)) (C is the arguments to B, B is the argument to A)

But NOT AS A (B) (C1) (C2) (C3) (B,C1,C2, C3, …. are arguments to A)

How should I escape / redirect/pipe in cmd prompt?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

According to Microsoft’s documentation, you can use the | operator for pipes.

And you will need to rewrite your command as:

B C1 C2 C3 | A

Hope this helps.

---

UPDATE

since you updated your question, I guess you are trying to do something like:

cmd.exe /C B C1 C2 C3

you can escape special characters with ^

or try to quote the string like this:

cmd.exe /C "B C1 C2 C3"

UPDATE 2

If you are having problem with cmd.exe /C and quotes (e.g. B, C1, C2, C3 contains space), you should enclose the whole command with another pair of quotes

cmd.exe /C ""B" "C1" "C2" "C3""

FYI, in the Processing quotation marks section in Microsoft’s documentation on cmd.exe:

If you specify /c or /k, cmd processes the remainder of string and
quotation marks are preserved only if all of the following conditions
are met:

• You do not use /s.
• You use exactly one set of quotation marks.
• You do not use any special characters within the quotation marks (for example: &<>( ) @ ^ |).
• You use one or more white-space characters within the quotation marks.
• The string within quotation marks is the name of an executable file.

If the previous conditions are not met, string is processed by
examining the first character to verify whether or not it is an
opening quotation mark. If the first character is an opening quotation
mark, it is stripped along with the closing quotation mark. Any text
following the closing quotation marks is preserved.

You may want to read Syntax : Escape Characters, Delimiters and Quotes too:

To launch a batch script with spaces in the Program Path requiring
“quotes”

CMD /k ""c:\batch files\test.cmd" "Parameter 1 with space" "Parameter2
with space""