For whatever reason, when I try to call a C# program I'm writing, and I try to pass two arguments with '--' in the command line, Powershell doesn't call the program with my command line.
For instance, I'm providing the command line:
.\abc.exe foo.txt -- bar --
When I call this, the C# program's main only gets the command line args:
foo.txt bar --
instead of
foo.txt -- bar --
as would be expected.
Anybody know why this would be happening?
BTW, if I call it as:
.\abc.exe foo.txt '--' bar '--'
it works as expected.
Also, calling it as:
& .\abc.exe foo.txt -- bar --
Doesn't seem to help.
My reason for thinking this is a powershell weirdness is that if I run the same command line from CMD.EXE everything works as expected.
A double hyphen instructs PowerShell to treat everything coming after as literal arguments rather than options, so that you can pass for instance a literal -foo
to your script/application/cmdlet.
Example:
PS C:\> echo "-bar" | select-string -bar
Select-String : A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter name 'bar'.
At line:1 char:28
+ "-bar" | select-string -bar <<<<
+ CategoryInfo : InvalidArgument: (:) [Select-String], ParameterBindingException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : NamedParameterNotFound,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.SelectStringCommand
vs.
PS C:\> echo "-bar" | select-string -- -bar
-bar
To avoid this behavior you must either quote ("--"
, '--'
) or escape (`--
) the double hyphen.
With PowerShell 3 you can use --% to stop the normal parsing powershell does.
.\abc.exe --% foo.txt -- bar --
wow. sometimes I really hate powershell. It seems that the interpreter is thinking '--' is the decrement operator or something. If I put the escape character before the -- parameters, i.e. use the command line:
.\abc.exe foo.txt `-- bar `--
all is well.
As I said, sometimes I really hate powershell. Hopefully this helps someone else with this problem.