Never removes any other ', nor interprets escapes.

So if you have a complicated command which you want to pass to CMD.exe you either have to remember CMD's argument quoting rules, and properly escape all of the quotes, or use /S, which triggers a special non-parsing rule of 'Strip first and last ' and treat all other characters as the command to execute unchanged'. Recall that the /C argument means 'execute this command as if I had typed it at the prompt, then quit'. Is there some subtlety to /s that's eluding me? When would it ever be necessary? When would it even make any difference?Ĭmd /S is very useful as it saves you having to worry about 'quoting quotes'. (In actual fact, however, it does not break things: cmd /s /c 'foo.exe arg1 arg2' works just fine.)

cmd /c 'foo.exe arg1 arg2', then it seems like quote removal would be a necessity, since there's no EXE named foo.exe arg1 arg2 on the system so it seems like opting out of quote removal using /s would actually break things. If the entire command line is quoted, e.g.(It won't remove them if the path has a space in the name - that's another of the arcane rules.) I can't imagine any reason to suppress the quote removal, so /s seems unnecessary.

cmd /c 'c: oolsoo.exe' arg1 arg2, then quotes are unnecessary, and if cmd wants to remove them, fine. If the path to the EXE is quoted, e.g.So it's not removing quotes around arguments it's either removing quotes around the path to the EXE you're running, or around the entire command line (or possibly around the first half of the command line, which would be bizarre). It only removes quotes under a certain arcane set of conditions, and one of those conditions is that the first character after the /c must be a quotation mark. What I don't understand is when the quote removal would break anything, because that's the only time /s ('suppress the default quote-removal behavior') would be necessary. The docs are confusing, but as far as I can tell, when you do cmd /c something, and the something contains quotation marks, then by default cmd will sometimes strip off those quotes, and /s tells it to leave them alone. This /s parameter evidently has something to do with some arcane quote handling. The Windows command prompt ( cmd.exe) has an optional /s parameter, which modifies the behavior of /c (run a particular command and then exit) or /k (run a particular command and then show a shell prompt).

What does s mean in english