How do I pass raw strings to commands through the command line in PowerShell?

Question

Our IT department is moving to Windows 8 and everyone is starting to use PowerShell as their default windows command line environment rather than the cmd.exe.

Unfortunately PowerShell evaluates the things you type in it and it's quite hard to pass raw command line arguments to programs.

For example I've a program inventory.exe that takes a special string that formats its output. I can't pass this special string in PowerShell as I get a mysterious error:

PS C:\Users\Administrator> inventory.exe 'inventory "," date "," owner'
inventory.exe error: No comma allowed

I assume that PowerShell evaluated the 'inventory "," date "," owner' string somehow and something else was passed to inventory.exe program as a result it printed an error.

This program works ok in cmd.exe:

C:\Documents and Settings\boda> inventory.exe 'inventory "," date "," owner'
... (the output that I expect) ...

It even gets worse if I type characters such as %, $ in PowerShell.

Does anyone know how to pass raw strings to commands in PowerShell?

Answer 1

If you are using Powershell v3.0, there is a new syntax to make Powershell avoid any extra parsing for arguments. Something like:

inventory.exe --% 'inventory', 'date', 'owner'

There are other approaches as mentioned here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/josebda/archive/2012/03/03/using-windows-powershell-to-run-old-command-line-tools-and-their-weirdest-parameters.aspx