string not properly interpreted when calling a script

[John_Dodo]

 Hello,

in a script I have to call psexec to execute a remote script on a remote target (I could probably do an invoke... but I didn't manage to make this work yet so for the moment I need to do it this way).

...
.\psexec.exe "\\$targetserver" -accepteula powershell '"$pathtomyscript"'+$local_rep+'\'+$filename+'" "C:\_Scripts\_Logs"'
...

When I run this no variable is interpreted. You can notice than the parameters block of the call to powershell is encapsulated in single quotes ' ' . You can also notice I tried to insert the variables in two different ways.

If I simply select this : '"$pathtomyscript "view-pool-gbl" "noVM" "noref" "'+$local_rep+'\'+$filename+'" "C:\_Scripts\_Logs"' then powershell interpretes it properly and resolvs the variables, but as soon as it's part of the call to psexec then it's not interpreted.

I have tried many other ways such as $var1+"text" etc but nothing seems to work.

Does anyone know how to make this work ?

Thank you.

O

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@John_Dodo 

I'm a little unclear on what the command should look like but the following three variables will be resolved within your existing script block, i.e. on the host doing the calling:

• $targetserver
• $local_rep
• $filename

The fourth "variable", $pathtomyscript, will not be resolved caller-side. Instead, it will be passed into remotely-initiated PowerShell call where that remote PowerShell session will try to parse $pathtomyscript - which will fail (or more correctly, it will resolve to $null.)

If you have defined $pathtomyscript within the caller-side script block then there's multiple ways of dealing with the string parsing, but perhaps the closest to what you already have would look like this:

.\psexec.exe "\\$targetserver" -accepteula powershell "`"$pathtomyscript$local_rep\$filename`"" "C:\_Scripts\_Logs"

Cheers,

Lain

[#3]

@LainRobertson thank you so much ! It works thanks to you.

Next step is to get rid of psexec but for the moment it will help a lot.