powershell output in shell

Question

I am trying to collect an powershell script output in a shell script.

ssh user@host "powershell Test-Path -Path C:/myfile" will if execute in bash just print True . If I save it to variable like ps_result=$(ssh ... >&1)

ps_result now contains ps_result=$'False\r' which looks weird and I don't know what to do with it in an if statement.

I have two Questions:

• Can I use powershell to print something more useful than whatever $'False\r' is?
• How to handle such an output in an if statement if [ $ps_result = 'False\r' ]; does not work?

Answer 1

$'False\r' represents a string that contains the literal value False followed by a CR character (\r).

The $'...' notation is a special Bash string notation called ANSI C-quoting, which supports escape sequences, such as \r for CR.

The CR character stems from the fact that Windows PowerShell uses CRLF (\r\n) newlines, whereas Bash expects Unix-style LF newlines (\n), and therefore considers the CR part of the data when it trims trailing newlines.

You can simply use $'False\r' in your if statement as well:

if [[ $ps_result == $'False\r' ]];

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As for preventing the CR characters in the output:

You cannot make PowerShell use LF-only newlines, so the best you can do is to remove the CR instances after the fact; e.g., via parameter expansion:

if [[ ${ps_result//$'\r'/} == 'False' ]];