PowerShell - Start-Process and Cmdline Switches

Question

I can run this fine    msbuild    C  WINDOWS Microsoft NET Framework v3 5 MSBuild exe   start-process  msbuild -wait   But when I run this code  below  I get an error    msbuild    C  WINDOWS Microsoft NET Framework v3 5 MSBuild exe  v q  nologo   start-process  msbuild -wait   Is there a way I can pass parameters to MSBuild using start-process  I m open to not using start-process  the only reason I used it was I needed to have the  command  as a variable   When I have C  WINDOWS Microsoft NET Framework v3 5 MSBuild exe  v q  nologo on a line by itself  how does that get handled in Powershell     Should I be using some kind of eval   kind of function instead

User · Answer

Warning

If you run PowerShell from a cmd.exe window created by Powershell, the 2nd instance no longer waits for jobs to complete.

cmd>  PowerShell
PS> Start-Process cmd.exe -Wait

Now from the new cmd window, run PowerShell again and within it start a 2nd cmd window: cmd2> PowerShell

PS> Start-Process cmd.exe -Wait
PS>

The 2nd instance of PowerShell no longer honors the -Wait request and ALL background process/jobs return 'Completed' status even thou they are still running !

I discovered this when my C# Explorer program is used to open a cmd.exe window and PS is run from that window, it also ignores the -Wait request. It appears that any PowerShell which is a 'win32 job' of cmd.exe fails to honor the wait request.

I ran into this with PowerShell version 3.0 on windows 7/x64

User · Answer

Using explicit parameters  it would be    msbuild    C  WINDOWS Microsoft NET Framework v3 5 MSBuild exe  start-Process -FilePath  msbuild -ArgumentList   v q    nologo    EDIT  quotes

User · Answer

I ve found using cmd works well as an alternative  especially when you need to pipe the output from the called application  espeically when it doesn t have built in logging  unlike msbuild   cmd  C   msbuild  args   gt  gt   outputfile

User · Answer

you are going to want to separate your arguments into separate parameter   msbuild    C  WINDOWS Microsoft NET Framework v3 5 MSBuild exe   arguments     v q  nologo  start-process  msbuild  arguments

User · Answer

Unless the OP is using PowerShell Community Extensions which does provide a Start-Process cmdlet along with a bunch of others   If this the case then Glennular s solution works a treat since it matches the positional parameters of pscx start-process   -path  position 1  -arguments  positon 2

[command-line] PowerShell - Start-Process and Cmdline Switches

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