[Bug] Add notes around `Start-ADTProcess -ArgumentList` parsing differences for 4.1 compared to 4.0

[gregbeck]

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PSAppDeployToolkit version

4.1.0

Describe the bug

When starting a process with Start-ADTProcess if an argument has quotes then the whole argument gets quotes and the internal quotes get escaped.

I am not sure if that is supposed to work but the install I am updating doesn't seem to like it.

Steps to reproduce

Simple example from command line.

1. Start-ADTProcess -FilePath 'cmd.exe' -ArgumentList @('/option1', '/option2 "thing"')
2. View command line in task manger
   "C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe" /option1 "/option2 \"thing\""

Doing the same thing with 4.0.6 the command line is, which is the expected result.
"C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe" /option1 /option2 "thing"

Environment data

Windows 11

[mjr4077au]

If you're using -ArgumentList with multiple arguments, it's expected that you'd use Start-ADTProcess -FilePath 'cmd.exe' -ArgumentList @('/option1', '/option2', 'thing'). The way you had it above will of course treat the quotes as literals because /option2 \"thing\" is technically one argument.

[mjr4077au]

Doing the same thing with 4.0.6 the command line is, which is the expected result.

Just to address this specifically; you are absolutely correct however that's because the implementation in 4.0 wasn't right and it's been corrected as part of the process code rewrite. The old setup didn't redirect standard conventions regarding how command lines and argument lists are parsed, but it does now and is backed by amongst 300 unit tests validating the correctness of the implementation.

[gregbeck]

Ok. It is one argument for the setup file, but I get what you are saying.

In Invoke-AppDeployToolkit.ps1 it would look more like this in 4.0.6 currently.

$installParam = @{
    FilePath     = 'setup.exe'
    ArgumentList = @(
        '/quiet'                           # Be quiet
        '/noreboot'                        # Do not automatically reboot
        '/enable feature1 "feature 2"'     # Turn on things
        '/log "{0}"' -f $adtConfig.Toolkit.LogPath
    )
}
Start-ADTProcess @installParam

[mjr4077au]

I can understand that mentally, the grouping like this feels correct, but it's against the rules that Microsoft stipulate while parsing arguments into a command line and vice-versa. With 4.1, and especially with the rewritten process code, we wanted to make sure we got this completely right and by the book.

If you specify everything as one string to -ArgumentList so that there's effectively one, big, long argument string, we'll not parse that and it will be sent through verbatim.