How to pass commands into the shell opened in new Windows Terminal

Question

I can run the following command from PowerShell to start another PowerShell instance, change the window name, then run ls command and open Chrome to a specific web site from the new PowerShell instance.

start powershell `
"-noexit", `
"`$host.ui.RawUI.WindowTitle` = 'list files and goto SO'; `
ls ;`
Start-Process chrome.exe https://stackoverflow.com/"

How do I do the same thing in the new Windows Terminal (wt)?

Running the following from PowerShell opens wt to the "Windows Powershell" profile and changes the title of the "Windows Powershell" tab.

start wt '-p "Windows PowerShell" --title  "list files and goto SO" '

However, I cannot pass in any additional commands to get executed in the Windows Terminal "Windows Powershell" profile shell.

Is this currently possible?

I am aware of the following: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/pull/3495 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/command-line-arguments?tabs=windows

Answer 1

The Using command-line arguments for Windows Terminal article appears to me a bit unclear (or even confusing). However, the (default) wt command new-tab offers the commandline parameter along with (or instead of?) the -p profile-name one. So use a command line as defined by powershell.exe -Help. Something like

• wt PowerShell.exe -NoExit -Command "& {$Host}" from Windows cmd command prompt, or
• wt.exe PowerShell.exe -NoExit -Command "& {`$Host}" from an open PowerShell session (note escaped dollar sign and explicit use of the .exe file extension in wt.exe).

BTW, I don't see any difference between wt PowerShell.exe -NoExit -Command "& {$Host}" and wt -p "Windows PowerShell" PowerShell.exe -NoExit -Command "& {$Host}". In both cases, the PowerShell starts in a wt tab… It's because I have default profile set to Windows PowerShell in settings.json under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\.

Unfortunately, a semicolon (;) is used in a wt instance to create a new tab; hence, it's not applicable as a PowerShell command separator. Therefore,

• wt PowerShell.exe -NoExit -Command "& {$Host; $PWD}" will fail. I don't know how-to escape that however I know a workaround:
• wt PowerShell.exe -NoExit -Command "& {$Host, $PWD}"; although doing that is still possible, I found a regular solution recently: use the \ (backslash) as an escape character for the ; (semicolon) it wt parameters:
• wt PowerShell.exe -NoExit -Command "& {$Host\; $PWD}".

For more complex/advanced commands, apply the Grouping operator ( ) as follows in a use case similar to yours (run from from an open PowerShell session):

wt.exe PowerShell.exe -NoExit -Command "& {(`$Host.UI.RawUI.WindowTitle='list files and goto SO'),`$PWD.Path,(Push-Location D:\Downloads),(ls e*.ps1),(Start-Process -PassThru chrome.exe https://stackoverflow.com/)}"

with the following result in Windows Terminal:

Above code will suspend parent Powershell until the terminal is closed; if you want to continue in parent Powershell then use

Start-Process wt.exe -ArgumentList "PowerShell.exe", "-NoExit", "-Command", "& {(`$Host.UI.RawUI.WindowTitle='list files and goto SO'),`$PWD.Path,(Push-Location D:\Downloads),(ls e*.ps1),(Start-Process -PassThru chrome.exe https://stackoverflow.com/)}"

Edit:

Windows Terminal uses the \ (backslash) as an escape character for the ; (semicolon). Hence, the latter workaround I replace with equivalent regular solving:

Start-Process wt.exe -ArgumentList "PowerShell.exe", "-NoExit", "-Command", "& {`$Host.UI.RawUI.WindowTitle='list files and goto SO'\;`$PWD.Path\;Push-Location D:\Downloads\;ls e*.ps1\;Start-Process -PassThru chrome.exe https://stackoverflow.com/}"

or, with -p flag:

Start-Process wt.exe -ArgumentList '-p "Windows PowerShell"', "PowerShell.exe", "-NoExit", "-Command", "& {`$Host.UI.RawUI.WindowTitle='list files and goto SO'\;`$PWD.Path\;Push-Location D:\Downloads\;ls e*.ps1\;Start-Process -PassThru chrome.exe https://stackoverflow.com/}"