How to disable/override PowerShell dot notation

Question

Commands in PowerShell are almost like Bash, but the dot notation expansion is creating a lot of work for me. Currently I have to wrap a lot of command parameters in quotes:

.\mvnw.cmd -Dmaven.repo.local=.m2/repository deploy:deploy-file -Durl=http://zippo:8081/repository/grinch/ -DrepositoryId=nexus -DgroupId=com.zippo -DartifactId=test -Dversion=1.0 -Dpackaging=jar -Dfile=test-1.0.jar

becomes

.\mvnw.cmd -D"maven.repo.local"=".m2/repository" deploy:deploy-file -Durl=http://zippo:8081/repository/grinch/ -DrepositoryId=nexus -DgroupId="com.zippo" -DartifactId=test -Dversion="1.0" -Dpackaging=jar -Dfile="test-1.0.jar"

How can I disable dot notation, or override the dot operator, replace it with something else, etc.?

Answer 1

How can I disable dot notation?

• The problem isn't dot notation, it is a bug in how PowerShell parses arguments to be passed to external programs:

  • A token such as -foo.bar is unexpectedly broken into two arguments, -foo and .bar - see GitHub issue #6291 (accidental duplicate: GitHub issue #15541); this is but one among several related bugs, present up to at least PowerShell 7.3.6.

• Escaping or quoting is indeed needed to work around this problem, but you can simplify it by `-escaping the initial - of each affected argument or by enclosing each as a whole in '...' (or "...", if you need string interpolation):

  # `-escape the initial - of all affected arguments.
  .\mvnw.cmd `-Dmaven.repo.local=.m2/repository deploy:deploy-file -Durl=http://zippo:8081/repository/grinch/ -DrepositoryId=nexus `-DgroupId=com.zippo -DartifactId=test `-Dversion=1.0 -Dpackaging=jar `-Dfile=test-1.0.jar
  
  # Alternative: Quote the affected arguments.
  .\mvnw.cmd '-Dmaven.repo.local=.m2/repository' deploy:deploy-file -Durl=http://zippo:8081/repository/grinch/ -DrepositoryId=nexus '-DgroupId=com.zippo' -DartifactId=test '-Dversion=1.0' -Dpackaging=jar '-Dfile=test-1.0.jar'
  

  • If you don't want to have to think about which specific arguments may be affected, quote them all, which - combined with the fact that you can pass arguments as an array of strings, using @(...), the array-subexpression operator - can be used to make a long command more readable, by spreading it across multiple lines:

    .\mvnw.cmd @(
      '-Dmaven.repo.local=.m2/repository'
      'deploy:deploy-file' 
      '-Durl=http://zippo:8081/repository/grinch/'
      '-DrepositoryId=nexus' 
      '-DgroupId=com.zippo'
      '-DartifactId=test'
      '-Dversion=1.0'
      '-Dpackaging=jar'
      '-Dfile=test-1.0.jar'
    )
    

Alternatives:

• You can use --%, the stop-parsing token, which obviates the need for quoting, but note its many limitations, notably the inability to (directly) incorporate PowerShell variables and expressions into the command - see this answer for details.

  # --% passes the remainder of the command line as-is to the target program
  .\mvnw.cmd --% -Dmaven.repo.local=.m2/repository deploy:deploy-file -Durl=http://zippo:8081/repository/grinch/ -DrepositoryId=nexus -DgroupId=com.zippo -DartifactId=test -Dversion=1.0 -Dpackaging=jar -Dfile=test-1.0.jar
  

• You can call via cmd /c, in which case you can quote your entire command line, which avoids the parsing bug (though note that the command specified in the string must then satisfy cmd.exe's syntax rules; they can differ from PowerShell's, albeit not in this case):

  cmd /c '.\mvnw.cmd -Dmaven.repo.local=.m2/repository deploy:deploy-file -Durl=http://zippo:8081/repository/grinch/ -DrepositoryId=nexus -DgroupId=com.zippo -DartifactId=test -Dversion=1.0 -Dpackaging=jar -Dfile=test-1.0.jar'