How to pass command-line arguments to a PowerShell ps1 file

Question

For years  I have used the cmd DOS Windows shell and passed command-line arguments to batch files  For example  I have a file  zuzu bat and in it  I access  1   2  etc  Now  I want to do the same when I call a PowerShell script when I am in a Cmd exe shell  I have a script  xuxu ps1  and I ve added PS1 to my PATHEXT variable and associated PS1 files with PowerShell   But no matter what I do  I seem unable to get anything from the  args variable  It always has length 0   If I am in a PowerShell shell  instead of cmd exe  it works  of course   But I m not yet comfortable enough to live in the PowerShell environment full time  I don t want to type powershell exe -command xuxu ps1 p1 p2 p3 p4  I want to type xuxu p1 p2 p3 p4    Is this possible  and if so  how   The sample I cannot get to work is trivial  foo ps1   Write-Host  Num Args    args Length  foreach   arg in  args        Write-Host  Arg   arg       The results are always like this   C  temp gt  foo Num Args  0 C  temp gt  foo a b c d Num Args  0 c  temp gt

User · Answer

Maybe you can wrap the PowerShell invocation in a .bat file like so:

rem ps.bat
@echo off
powershell.exe -command "%*"

If you then placed this file under a folder in your PATH, you could call PowerShell scripts like this:

ps foo 1 2 3

Quoting can get a little messy, though:

ps write-host """hello from cmd!""" -foregroundcolor green

User · Answer

After digging through the PowerShell documentation  I discovered some useful information about this issue  You can t use the  args if you used the param      at the beginning of your file  instead you will need to use  PSBoundParameters  I copy pasted your code into a PowerShell script  and it worked as you d expect in PowerShell version 2  I am not sure what version you were on when you ran into this issue    If you are using  PSBoundParameters  and this ONLY works if you are using param      at the beginning of your script   then it is not an array  it is a hash table  so you will need to reference it using the key   value pair   param  p1   p2   p3   p4   Script args    write-host  Num Args     PSBoundParameters Keys Count foreach   key in  PSBoundParameters keys         Script args       key      PSBoundParameters   key            write-host  Script args   And when called with     PS gt    foo ps1 a b c d   The result is     Num Args   4  p1 a   p2 b   p3 c   p4 d

User · Answer

You could declare your parameters in the file  like param    string  para1  string  param2   And then call the PowerShell file like so   temp ps1 para1 para2    para10  etc

User · Answer

You may not get  xuxu p1 p2 p3 p4  as it seems  But when you are in PowerShell and you set  PS  gt  set-executionpolicy Unrestricted -scope currentuser   You can run those scripts like this     xuxu p1 p2 p3 p4   or    xuxu p1 p2 p3 p4   or    xuxu ps1 p1 p2 p3 p4   I hope that makes you a bit more comfortable with PowerShell

User · Answer

This article helps   In particular  this section       -File        Runs the specified script in the local scope   dot-sourced    so that the functions and variables that the script creates are available in the current session  Enter the script file path and any parameters  File must be the last parameter in the command  because all characters typed after the File parameter name are interpreted as the script file path followed by the script parameters    i e    powershell exe -File  C  myfile ps1  arg1 arg2 arg3   means run the file myfile ps1 and arg1 arg2  amp  arg3 are the parameters for the PowerShell script

User · Answer

if you want to invoke ps1 scripts from cmd and pass arguments without invoking the script like  powershell exe script ps1 -c test script -c test   wont work     you can do the following  setx PATHEXT    PATHEXT   PS1     m assoc  ps1 Microsoft PowerShellScript 1 ftype Microsoft PowerShellScript 1 powershell exe   1       This is assuming powershell exe is in your path   https   docs microsoft com en-us windows-server administration windows-commands ftype

User · Answer

OK  so first this is breaking a basic security feature in PowerShell  With that understanding  here is how you can do it    Open an Windows nbsp Explorer window Menu Tools -  Folder Options -  tab File Types Find the PS1 file type and click the advanced button Click the New button For Action put  Open For the Application put   C  WINNT system32 WindowsPowerShell v1 0 powershell exe   -file    1       You may want to put a -NoProfile argument in there too depending on what your profile does

[command-line] How to pass command-line arguments to a PowerShell ps1 file

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