PowerShell & MSDeploy - Arguments with Spaces

Question

I cannot work out how to pass arguments that contain folders with spaces using msdeploy.exe and PowerShell v4.

Sample Powershell Script

Answer 1

When invoking commands PowerShell does some auto quoting that does not work well with MSDeploy. There are a couple of ways to avoid the auto quoting. One is to use the Start-Process cmdlet where you can specify the exact command line that you want but it can become a bit tedious to get the output of the new process to appear as output of the PowerShell script that you are running.

Another option is to use the --% specifier to turn off PowerShell parsing. However, doing that will not allow you to use variables in the command line because - well, parsing has been turned off. But you can get around this by using the Invoke-Expression cmdlet to first build the command line including the --% and whatever variables you want and then let PowerShell evaluate it:

$fl1 = "D:\space space\a.txt";
$fl2 = "D:\space space\b.txt";
$arguments = "-verb:sync -source:filePath=""$fl1"" -dest:filePath=""$fl2"""
$commandLine = 'msdeploy.exe --% ' + $arguments
Invoke-Expression $commandLine