Question

Starting up notepad++ or many other GUI applications in Windows that will accepted fully qualified filenames of documents on the command line, but which do not accept them if they are not fully qualified, is often done in DOS/Windows batch files like this:

 @echo off
 start "notepad++" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\notepad++.exe" %*

The above, if saved as “npp.cmd” will let you type “npp foo.txt” and it will work.
Note that without the npp.cmd, even typing out the full path to the exe, but not fully qualifying the file to edit doesn’t work, like this:

 "C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\notepad++.exe" foo.txt

This however, DOES work:

 "C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\notepad++.exe" c:\users\warren\foo.txt

A way to easily work around this limitation is to make a batch file (.cmd) as shown at the top of this file. I’m learning PowerShell and trying to find the equivalent magic to the “start …. %*” incantation in the batchfile at the top. I believe it would have to be a ‘powershell function’.

Here’s what I have so far:

new-item -path alias:nppapp -value "C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\notepad++.exe"
function npp { nppapp $args }

The above is equivalent, in the end to simply an alias, because $args is really not equivalent to %*, in that it does not do parameter expansion. I think I need something like this:

new-item -path alias:nppapp -value "C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\notepad++.exe"
function npp { nppapp globexpand($args) }

globexpand is of course, a placeholder, for some kind of expansion/globbing routine, which I haven’t been able to find yet in PowerShell.

Answer 1

try this:

new-item -path alias:nppapp -value "C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\notepad++.exe"

function npp { nppapp (join-path -Path $pwd -ChildPath $args[0]) }

$pwd is an automatic variable with the current working path as value

Edit:

function npp { 
if ($args[0] -match '.:\\.+')
{
nppapp $args[0]
}
else
{
nppapp (join-path -Path $pwd -ChildPath $args[0]) }
}