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 arguments:
foo.txt bar --
instead of
foo.txt -- bar --
as would be expected.
Why would this 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.
& is the call operator which allows you to execute a command, a script, or a function.
To pass multiple parameters you must use the command line syntax that includes the names of the parameters. For example, here is a sample PowerShell script that runs the Get-Service function with two parameters. The parameters are the name of the service(s) and the name of the Computer.
% is an alias for the ForEach-Object cmdlet. An alias is just another name by which you can reference a cmdlet or function.
To run scripts via the command prompt, you must first start up the PowerShell executable (powershell.exe), with the PowerShell location of C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\powershell.exe and then pass the script path as a parameter to it.
With PowerShell 3 you can use --%
to stop the normal parsing PowerShell does.
.\abc.exe --% foo.txt -- bar --
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.
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