Running a PowerShell Script with a Space in the Path

Taken from Dave Donaldson's blog at:  http://arcware.net/running-a-powershell-script-with-a-space-in-the-path/

Like with any new technology, getting started with PowerShell was not without a few hiccups. One of the first issues I ran into was how to properly pass script locations to PowerShell so that it could actually run them.

It turns out that PowerShell is a bit finicky in how it locates the script to run. You basically have two options for getting PowerShell to find and run your scripts:

1. Explicitly pass the full path of the script to PowerShell, or
2. Add your script location to the PATH environment variable so that you can just pass the script name

As simple as those sound, there's still a catch: if the path to your script contains a space, PowerShell won't be able to find it and will throw an error, unless you use some special notation. For example, below I'm trying to run a PowerShell script where the path has a space in it:

Enclosing the path in quotes works with your basic cmd.exe, but not in PowerShell. To get this to work in PowerShell, you need to use notation that follows this format:

"& '[full path to script]'"

I told you the notation was special. So now I have this, which will run the script just fine:

And there you have it. You can bet I've filed this one away permanently.