double quotes in string literal arguments get removed when calling native commands

[vors]

Steps to reproduce

On macOS run

osascript -e 'display notification "FOO" with title "TITLE"'

Expected behavior

Show notification, just like in bash

Actual behavior

PS /> osascript -e 'display notification "FOO" with title "TITLE"'                                                             
21:24: execution error: The variable FOO is not defined. (-2753)
PS /> bash                                                                                                                     
bash-3.2$ osascript -e 'display notification "FOO" with title "TITLE"'
bash-3.2$

Environment data

> $PSVersionTable
Name                           Value                                                                                                                   
----                           -----                                                                                                                   
PSVersion                      6.0.0-alpha                                                                                                             
PSEdition                      Core                                                                                                                    
PSCompatibleVersions           {1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0...}                                                                                                 
BuildVersion                   3.0.0.0                                                                                                                 
GitCommitId                    v6.0.0-alpha.14                                                                                                         
CLRVersion                                                                                                                                             
WSManStackVersion              3.0                                                                                                                     
PSRemotingProtocolVersion      2.3                                                                                                                     
SerializationVersion           1.1.0.1  

[thezim]

The following change does work.

osascript -e 'display notification \"FOO\" with title \"TITLE\"'

Per the man page.

-e statement
       Enter one line of a script.  If -e is given, osascript will not look for a filename in the argument list.
       Multiple -e options may be given to build up a multi-line script.  Because most scripts use characters that
       are special to many shell programs (for example, AppleScript uses single and double quote marks, ``('',
       ``)'', and ``*''), the statement will have to be correctly quoted and escaped to get it past the shell
       intact.

[vors]

@thezim good to know, thank you!
I still think there is an issue, because it's super unintitive for me, why I need to escape these quotes, when the whole parameter is already wrapped in the single-quoted string.

Also it related to the pillar of "making PS more compatible with existing shells to allow more commands work thru copy-paste".

[thezim]

@vor I agree. I would prefer your example to work too.

[thezim]

Invoke-AppleScript would be a nice cmdlet for macOS. Following would lead me to believe is could be done.

http://jonathanpeppers.com/Blog/xamarin-ios-under-the-hood-calling-objective-c-from-csharp
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/articles/standard/native-interop

[thezim]

@vors This works too.

'display notification "FOO" with title "TITLE"' | osascript

[lzybkr]

Repro (using test code in our repo):

PS> cd test/tools/EchoArgs
PS> dotnet run 'a "b" c'
Arg 0 is <a b c>
PS> bash
$ dotnet run 'a "b" c'
Arg 0 is <a "b" c>

[lzybkr]

Note that the behavior is consistent with Windows, but maybe it shouldn't be.

[DemiMarie]

Why is it this way on Windows? If I recall correctly, this behavior was a major annoyance.

[TSlivede]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this a duplicate of #1995 ?

@lzybkr I think it absolutely must be consistent with Windows, but double escaping should not be necessary on any platform.

[BrucePay]

@vors Note that in the workaround on macOS, the double quotes are being escaped with ''. PowerShell doesn't treat \ as the escape character so clearly osascript is doing it's own escape processing.
@lzybkr the value of argv[0] is exactly what I'd expect it to be. Since windows CreateProcess passes arguments as a simple string, process startup code needs to break that string up into individual arguments. It does this by processing the quotes that are passed, doing quote removal for string arguments.