PowerShell quoting

Question

PowerShell quoting

Opened this issue a year ago · 5 comments

The --dry-run output on Windows works in Command Prompt, but not PowerShell, because PowerShell gets weird about unquoted arguments with the dot (.) symbol. Should the Windows --dry-run put double quotes around each argument?

Answer 1 · 2024-02-02T04:41:10.000Z

xref: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.core/about/about_quoting_rules?view=powershell-7.4

Answer 2 · 2024-02-02T18:57:34.000Z

OK, so I guess the solution is to:

Replace all ' symbols in each argument with '' to escape them.
Surround each argument with single quote (') symbols.

This should cover all the quoting cases for PowerShell.

Of course, then the dry-run output won't work in Command Prompt anymore... but I'm not sure we can have it both ways. Not unless there is a way to check the type of the attached console.

Answer 3 · 2024-08-13T13:20:25.000Z

Probably will be sufficient to check an environment variable like WT_SESSION, which should be set for PowerShell, but typically unset for Command Prompt. See this SO answer for elaboration.

Answer 4 · 2024-08-13T21:46:12.000Z

In my hands WT_SESSION and WT_PROFILE_ID are defined iff running in Windows Terminal, regardless of whether it's PowerShell or cmd.exe.

(I personally think it's okay to not support the cmd.exe case here.)

Answer 5 · 2025-01-10T18:16:12.000Z

As of 749bc50, Jaunch on Windows now detects which type of prompt it was launched from. The C layer could then pass this information to the Kotlin layer, which could use it to emit the proper style of quoting. I'm a little torn on whether this is too magical, though; perhaps instead we should have some explicit flags controlling it like --dry-run=ps1 or --dry-run=cmd or --dry-run=sh? But I'm probably overthinking it.