How to expand a variable as several space separated program arguments

Question

Dears,

I have an environment variable containing all the arguments to pass to a program. VAR_NAME=/arg1 /arg2 /arg3 ...

I tried invoking the program using:

program $Env.VAR_NAME

Unfortunately the environment variable expends to a single argument.

Thanks.

you could try `program ($Env.VAR_NAME -split ' ')` - this will return a list of your arguments as a string array — Martin Brandl, Apr 26 '20 at 09:20
[Here](https://stackoverflow.com/a/74757686/1147688) I provide a few different methods, to expand *commandlet* arguments, using variables. — not2qubit, Dec 11 '22 at 01:11

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 26 '20 at 09:30

4

Just split the environment variable to return a list of arguments:

program ($Env.VAR_NAME -split ' ')

answered Apr 26 '20 at 09:30

Martin Brandl

1

Nicely done; just to clarify the constraints: `program` is assumed to be an _external_ program rather than a PowerShell command, and simple splitting by spaces won't work if the value contains quoted arguments that have embedded spaces themselves - [this answer](https://stackoverflow.com/a/69170814/45375) to a related question tries to cover all angles. As an aside: `program (-split $Env.VAR_NAME)` provides more flexibility, because it also tolerates multiple spaces between embedded arguments and ignore leading and trailing whitespace. – mklement0 Sep 14 '21 at 02:02

1 Answers1