Handling of QUOTATION MARK characters appears to have changed in 7.3.0

[Liturgist]

Prerequisites

• Write a descriptive title.
• Make sure you are able to repro it on the latest released version
• Search the existing issues.
• Refer to the FAQ.
• Refer to Differences between Windows PowerShell 5.1 and PowerShell.

Steps to reproduce

The following statement was working under 7.2.

& svn.exe co "https://svnrepo.myco.com/db/trunk/$_`"`

GRAVE ACCENT characters not showing up correctly. Sorry for the picture.

After installing 7.3.0, it produces:

svn: E170000: Illegal repository URL '%22https://svnrepo.myco.com/db/trunk/Scripts%22

Expected behavior

Working copy is checked out.

Actual behavior

Working copy is not checked out.

Error details

No response

Environment data

PSVersion                      7.3.0
PSEdition                      Core
GitCommitId                    7.3.0
OS                             Microsoft Windows 10.0.19042
Platform                       Win32NT
PSCompatibleVersions           {1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0…}
PSRemotingProtocolVersion      2.3
SerializationVersion           1.1.0.1
WSManStackVersion              3.0

Visuals

No response

[pinkfloydx33]

Have noticed this as well; it broke some of our CI scripts that call out to all sorts of executables. Have also experienced slightly different behaviors between windows and Linux depending on the target application (for example ef migration bundles) and sometimes different if I splat arguments.

So far only when invoking applications and not with commandlets

I intend on opening issues in a few repos that offer argument completer scripts (Flux, helm, kustomize) as their powershell variants are all broken since 7.3 (with a simple fix)... Will link here once I do.

I checked release notes and didn't see mention of this behavior.

[mklement0]

v7.3 introduced a breaking change with respect to the - previously fundamentally broken - handling of (embedded) " chars. in arguments passed to external programs.

To make the previous workarounds that build on the broken behavior work, you must (temporarily) set $PSNativeCommandArgumentPassing to 'Legacy'.

For a summary of the consequences of the breaking change, see this comment.

[ghost]

This issue has been marked as answered and has not had any activity for 1 day. It has been closed for housekeeping purposes.

[Liturgist]

@mklement0, is it possible to write a script that will run unchanged on 7.3+ and 7.2- without embedding $PSNativeCommandArgumentPassing`? Is that the only way?

Trying to install 7.2.7 fails because. "A newer version of PowerShell is already installed" How can I install the earlier version in order to test?

[mklement0]

@Liturgist, unfortunately, I don't think that's possible: if you want existing code to run without (other) modifications on both 7.2- / Windows PowerShell and 7.3+, you'll need to deal with $PSNativeCommandArgumentPassing.

Going forward and/or if modifying old code is possible, for cross-edition / cross-version code you could consider using the ie function from my Native module (Install-Module Native), which works in both editions and all PS Core versions, irrespective of the effective value of $PSNativeCommandArgumentPassing.
Additionally, it incorporates the proposed-in-vain accommodations for batch files and other high-profile CLIs, so that no workarounds are needed in most cases: just prepend ie to your external-program calls.

[mklement0]

@Liturgist, as for installing an older version alongside the most recent one: I haven't personally tried, but it looks like installing via a specific version's .zip package may do the trick.