Problems with the ampersand (&) special character

[AndroSavvy]

I am using Clink v1.6.16 with Windows Command Prompt and an Oh-My-Posh theme and I am not able to cd to a directory name containing an ampersand &.

cd "_Stores&Orders"
Orders' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

If I use the escape character ^ before & I get another error:

cd "_Stores^&Orders"
The system cannot find the path specified.

But if I exit Clink using cmd /D the cd is working as it should.

Any idea what the problem is?

[chrisant996]

I think whatever you are encountering is external to Clink.
It works fine for me:

Do you use any kind of enhanced directory changing tool such as z.lua or zoxide or CD Deluxe or etc?

I bet you have an alias and/or batch script for cd, and the script doesn't handle quoted arguments quite correctly.

[chrisant996]

Did you mean where cmd?

No, I meant cd.

You're experiencing problems with cd.

It seems like you've got a doskey alias that's replacing the cd command.

[chrisant996]

@AndroSavvy what happens if you put an extra space character before the cd command?

cd "_Stores&Orders"

The extra space(s) bypasses any aliases and invokes the built-in CMD cd command directly.

[AndroSavvy]

This was the problem!
I had an Aliases.cmd file with some doskey lines, one of them being doskey pwd=echo %cd%.
I commented out the line and now the cd is working again as it should.

Thank you very much Christian for helping me solve the problem!

[chrisant996]

Oh, that's very interesting.

This seems to be related to oh-my-posh after all.
Apparently oh-my-posh must be looking up an alias defined for pwd and then running it???
But that seems very strange.

• What version of oh-my-posh are you using?
• Can you share your oh-my-posh.lua script?

Also, the pwd alias has a bug and will always malfunction with a directory whose name contains &. Because the command echo %cd% doesn't do anything to add quotes when the directory name contains &. So it becomes echo C:\tmp\_Stores&Orders which means run echo C:\tmp\_Stores and then run Orders.

[AndroSavvy]

No problem.

oh-my-posh.lua

load(io.popen('oh-my-posh init cmd --config C:/Users/<UserName>/AppData/Local/Programs/oh-my-posh/themes/takuya_cust.omp.json'):read("*a"))()

oh-my-posh version
21.1.0

I learned that instead of pwd I can use anyhow cd to see the current directory path.