PowerShell’s Call Operator (&) Arguments with Embedded Spaces and Quotes

I was recently upgrading a PowerShell script that used the v2 nunit-console runner to use the v3 one instead when I ran across a weird issue with PowerShell. I’ve haven’t found a definitive bug report or release note yet to describe the change in behaviour, hence I’m documenting my observation here in the meantime.

When running the script on my desktop machine, which runs Windows 10 and PowerShell v5.x it worked first time, but when pushing the script to our build server, which was running Windows Server 2012 and PowerShell v4.x it failed with a weird error that suggested the command line being passed to nunit-console was borked.

Passing Arguments with Spaces

The v3 nunit-console command line takes a “/where” argument which allows you to provide a filter to describe which test cases to run. This is a form of expression and the script’s default filter was essentially this:

cat == Integration && cat != LongRunning

Formatting this as a command line argument it then becomes:

/where:“cat == Integration && cat != LongRunning”

Note that the value for the /where argument contains spaces and therefore needs to be enclosed in double quotes. An alternative of course is to enclose the whole argument in double quotes instead:

“/where:cat == Integration && cat != LongRunning”

or you can try splitting the argument name and value up into two separate arguments:

/where “cat == Integration && cat != LongRunning”

I’ve generally found these command-line argument games unnecessary unless the tool I’m invoking is using some broken or naïve command line parsing library [1]. (In this particular scenario I could have removed the spaces too but if it was a path, like “C:\Program Files\Xxx”, I would not have had that luxury.)

PowerShell Differences

What I discovered was that on PowerShell v4 when an argument has embedded spaces it appears to ignore the embedded quotes and therefore sticks an extra pair of quotes around the entire argument, which you can see here:

> $where='/where:"cat == Integration"'; & cmd /c echo $where
"/where:"cat == Integration""

…whereas on PowerShell v5 it “notices” that the value with spaces is already correctly quoted and therefore elides the outer pair of double quotes:

> $where='/where:"cat == Integration"'; & cmd /c echo $where
/where:"cat == Integration"

On PowerShell v4 only by removing the spaces, which I mentioned above may not always be possible, can you stop it adding the outer pair of quotes:

> $where='/where:"cat==Integration"'; & cmd /c echo $where
/where:"cat==Integration"

…of course now you don’t need the quotes anymore :o). However, if for some reason you are formatting the string, such as with the –f operator that might be useful (e.g. you control the value but not the format string).

I should point out that this doesn’t just affect PowerShell v4, I also tried it on my Vista machine with PowerShell v2 and that exhibited the same behaviour, so my guess is this was “fixed” in v5.

[1] I once worked with an in-house C++ based application framework that completely ignored the standard parser that fed main() and instead re-parsed the arguments, very badly, from the raw string obtained from GetCommandLine().