Start a PowerShell script in R via system2()

My line of code in the R console is like this:

system2("powershell", args=c("-File", "C:\\Path To File\\PowerShellScript.ps1"))

And the PowerShell script itself is very simple. It just should start PowerPoint (for demonstration purpose).

Start-Process "powerpnt.exe"

But the execution fails with the following error output (I translated it to English so hopefully the content is given correctly...)

Error processing file “C:\Path” because the file does not have the extension “.ps1”.

Some annotations:

• As you can see my file has the extension .ps1
• My PowerShell version is 5.1.22621.4391
• I tried also to set a perhaps better fitting ExecutionPolicy, but in the PowerShell the other ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted is maintained

So can you please help me to execute my PowerShell script? Many thanks in advance.

The behavior described is consistent with what you'd see if you passed an unqualified file path containing whitespace, ie:

powershell -File C:\Path with spaces\to\file.ps1

The way to solve this is to qualify the full extent of the path with literal quotation marks:

powershell -File "C:\Path with spaces\to\file.ps1"

Which in an R string literal you should be able to express with the simple escape sequence \":

system2("powershell", args=c("-File", "\"C:\\PathToFile\\PowerShellScript.ps1\""))