How to escape spaces in a PowerShell one-liner

Question

I want to run an exe with params using powershell one line, like this -

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted "Start-Process -Path program.exe -ArgumentList somefile.txt, Run"

And it works, but when I am trying to insert full path with spaces it's crashing

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted "Start-Process -Path program.exe -ArgumentList "C:\Program Files\somefile.txt", "Run" "

I tried to use single quote or escape with ` but it's not helping

Maybe someone know what I do wrong?

P.s. running from inside cmd.exe

mklement0 · Accepted Answer · 2018-07-30 15:14:40Z

The easiest solution is to use single-quoting ('...') for the embedded strings:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted "Start-Process -Path program.exe -ArgumentList 'C:\Program Files\somefile.txt', 'Run'"

Since it is PowerShell that will be interpreting the command string, it recognizes the embedded '...' strings as string literals.

If you try to embed double-quoted strings ("..."), you face two hurdles:

First, PowerShell's CLI requires \ as the escape character for " (whereas internally it is `), so you need to escape the " inside the overall "..." command string as \".
Additionally, due to a known problem with Start-Process, you need an extra round of escaping, which makes the solution quite obscure and unwieldy, because you must escape each embedded " as \"`\" (!).

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted "Start-Process -Path program.exe -ArgumentList \"`\"C:\Program Files\somefile.txt\"`\", \"`\"Run\"`\" "

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