How do I pass in a string with spaces into PowerShell?

Question

Given:

# test1.ps1
param(
    $x = \"\",
    $y = \"\"
)

&echo $x $y

Used like so:

powershell test.ps1

Answer 1

Randomly found this today; you can use a backtick ` to escape spaces:

PS & C:\Program` Files\....

Just in case anyone stumbles onto this again

Answer 2

Well, this is a cmd.exe problem, but there are some ways to solve it.

1. Use single quotes

   powershell test.ps1 -x 'hello world' -y 'my friend'
   

2. Use the -file argument

   powershell -file test.ps1 -x "hello world" -y "my friend"
   

3. Create a .bat wrapper with the following content

   @rem test.bat
   @powershell -file test.ps1 %1 %2 %3 %4
   

   And then call it:

   test.bat -x "hello world" -y "my friend"
   

Answer 3

I had a similar problem but in my case I was trying to run a cmdlet, and the call was being made within a Cake script. In this case the single quotes and -file argument did not work:

powershell Get-AuthenticodeSignature 'filename with spaces.dll'

Resulting error: Get-AuthenticodeSignature : A positional parameter cannot be found that accepts argument 'with'.

I wanted to avoid the batch file if possible.

Solution

What did work was to use a cmd wrapper with /S to unwrap outer quotes:

cmd /S /C "powershell Get-AuthenticodeSignature 'filename with spaces.dll'"

Answer 4

A possible solution was in my case to nest the single and the double quotes.

test.ps1 -x '"Hello, World!"' -y '"my friend"'