Running CMD command in PS

Question

In PS2, I always use cmd.exe /C to run DOS commands.
However, I ran into this scenario:
The first try, using cmd.exe /C, failed with the above error.
The second try, running the command directly, was successful.
Anyone can explain why?
Thanks.

Answer 1

PowerShell will strip the quotation marks from your string when it gets passed to cmd.exe, and you have some special characters in that password which will cause problems if it's not quoted.  In this case, it's the > character 4 characters into the
password that's ending the command.  It tries to set a 4-character password, and sends stdout to a goofy file name starting with 3A.
There's also a problem with the backticks in the password, which will also be removed by PowerShell when it parses a double-quoted string.  Even in your second command, you'll find that the password doesn't work if you try to type it with the backticks
included.
As a simple workaround, wrap the password in a set of single quotes (leaving the double quotes included) if you want to pass it to cmd.exe for some reason.  This will also prevent PowerShell from using the backtick as an escape character:
cmd.exe /C net user Administrator '"B?E;>3A`w+8D6z^G2T`Y3K1"'
If you want to just run net user from PowerShell, I'd probably put the password into a single-quoted here-string to avoid any problems with escaping characters:
$password = @'
B?E;>3A`w+8D6z^G2T`Y3K1
net user Administrator $password