[SOLVED] Escape (Grave) Character in Powershell

Escape (Grave) Character in Powershell

The recommended installation instructions for AWS Copilot on Windows are:

New-Item -Path 'C:\copilot' -ItemType directory; `
  Invoke-WebRequest -OutFile 'C:\copilot\copilot.exe' https://github.com/aws/copilot-cli/releases/latest/download/copilot-windows.exe

According to the Microsoft guide, the escape character has a ton of usages, but I don't understand how it is being used in the statement given to us by Amazon to install Copilot.

Could someone clarify the usage of ` in the first line?

[the code works fine, just wondering about usage]

Solution

The backtick ` can be used as a line continuation, for instance, when dealing with multiple parameters.

A simple example of valid syntax:

Get-ChildItem `
    -Path . `
    -Filter *.ps1 `
    -File

However, this usage can 100% of the times be replaced for a better / cleaner form of parameter binding, called splatting:

$getChildItemSplat = @{
    Path   = '.'
    Filter = '*.ps1'
    File   = $true
}
Get-ChildItem @getChildItemSplat

For the specifics of your question, the ` is completely unnecessary and the same can be said for the ;.

The following would work as well:

New-Item -Path 'C:\copilot' -ItemType Directory
Invoke-WebRequest -OutFile 'C:\copilot\copilot.exe' https://github.com/aws/copilot-cli/releases/latest/download/copilot-windows.exe