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Comment by sveiss | Hacker News Reader

You can, but sometimes the quoting rules differ.

For example, bcdedit with its {}-delimited GUIDs breaks in PowerShell without additional quoting, but works fine in cmd.exe. Makes following online instructions tricky if you're not familiar with that nuance.

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Well, the nice thing in PowerShell is that you have explicit control over "stop parsing here and just pass the rest to the application verbatim" with --%. Solves a lot of quoting nightmares.

How come none of the tutorials I've read and StackOverflow questions involving Start-Process mention that?

Thanks.

Well, it won't work with Start-Process, and it's also buried deep in the documentation and impossible to google. I constantly forget about the exact character sequence, too.

That's indeed nice. I wonder if there is something like that for ZSH.

I don't know for sure about ZSH and can't test it at the moment, but Bash has -- for this purpose. It may work in ZSH as well.

Isn't the -- a feature of the command to stop option parsing and treat the remaining arguments as file names? AFAIK it's not a shell feature that solves quoting (and it's not that easy on Unix either, since running a program involves argument parsing instead of just passing a string).

You could define `--` as "perform no expansions for the rest of the line", then you wouldn't have to worry about globs or `{}` which is where most of my annoyances come from.

BTW `--` isn't treated specially in version 4 of Bash.

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