Issue when passing a parameter with the & character to a npm cli package from PowerShell on Windows

[ExE-Boss]

I'm opening this issue because:

• npm is crashing.
• npm is producing an incorrect install.
• npm is doing something I don't understand.
• npm is producing incorrect or undesirable behavior.
• Other (see below for feature requests):

What's going wrong?

PowerShell can’t properly pass string arguments containing the & symbol to Windows Command Prompt scripts, if the string containing the ampersand doesn’t have spaces, due to how the cmd prompt parses the & as a command delimiter, even in a string.

How can the CLI team reproduce the problem?

The following PowerShell log demonstrates the issue:

PS C:\> echo-cli 'https://example.com/?a=1&b=2'
https://example.com/?a=1
'b' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

I’m providing a fix in npm/cmd-shim#27.

PowerShell log with said fix applied:

PS C:\> echo-cli 'https://example.com/?a=1&b=2'
https://example.com/?a=1&b=2

supporting information:

This happens on both PowerShell 6 and Windows PowerShell 5.1.

• npm -v prints: 6.0.1
• node -v prints: v10.1.0
• npm config get registry prints: https://registry.npmjs.org/
• OS: Windows 10
• See also Issue when passing a parameter with the & character to a npm cli package from PowerShell on Windows pnpm/pnpm#1199