dotnet ef scaffold Unrecognized option ‘-t firstTable -t secondTable’ – pass arguments stored in a string

by

If you construct a string such as -t foo and pass it via a variable to an external program, it is passed as a single, double-quoted argument (that is, donet will literally see "-t foo" on its command line) – and therefore won’t be recognized as parameter name-value combination.

  • You must pass -t and foo separately, as elements of an array instead.

  • When you use an array as an argument for an external program, PowerShell passes the array elements as individual, space-separated arguments:

# Create an array such as '-t', 'foo', '-t', 'bar', ...
$tableArgs = 
  $tables | ForEach-Object{            
    '-t', "$_"  
  }

# Note the use of $tableArgs as-is, which causes PowerShell to pass
# e.g. ... -t foo -t bar ... behind the scenes.
dotnet ef dbcontext scaffold $strConn Npgsql.EntityFrameworkCore.PostgreSQL --context MyModel $tableArgs -v -f

To provide a simpler example: The equivalent of foo -s -o "bar baz" file1 is:

$a="-s", '-o', 'bar baz', 'file1'; foo $a

As the first code snippet implies, you’re free to mix explicitly specified arguments with those provided via an array.

As an aside:

  • If the array containing the argument is stored in a variable, you may alternatively use splatting, i.e yo may pass @tableArgs (@ instead of $). However, given that with external programs and arrays this is the same as passing an array (variable) directly, there is no advantage in doing so.

  • However, splatting is necessary in order to pass programmatically constructed arguments to PowerShell commands, where it is more commonly based on a hashtable whose keys identify the target parameters, which enables passing named arguments.

More Related Contents:

  1. How do I pass multiple parameters into a function in PowerShell?
  2. how do I pass a range of values on the command line – passing an expression as an argument
  3. How do I do the bash equivalent of $PROGPATH/program in Powershell?
  4. ‘kubectl patch’ works on Linux Bash but not in Windows Powershell ISE
  5. How can I pass an argument to a PowerShell script?
  6. Powershell color formatting with format operator
  7. Replacing a string with a variable in Get-ADGroup
  8. Start-Process with PowerShell.exe exhibits different behavior with embedded single quotes and double quotes
  9. How to handle command-line arguments in PowerShell
  10. Pass function as a parameter
  11. Invoke direct methods or methods with arguments / variables / parameters in EL
  12. How can I pass a member function where a free function is expected?
  13. Powershell function call changing passed string into int
  14. Different behaviour and output when piping in CMD and PowerShell
  15. How to perform keystroke inside powershell?
  16. How to get an object’s property’s value by property name?
  17. Why does ‘continue’ behave like ‘break’ in a Foreach-Object?
  18. Why don’t .NET objects in PowerShell use the current directory?
  19. Is there a way to pass serializable objects to a PowerShell script with start-process?
  20. How to use PowerShell copy-item and keep structure
  21. How to download the SSL certificate from a website using PowerShell?
  22. Is there an alternative to GUID when using msiexec to uninstall an application?
  23. Can’t install nuget package because of “Failed to initialize the PowerShell host”
  24. What security setting is preventing Remote PowerShell 2.0 from accessing UNC paths
  25. PowerShell Capture Write-Host output
  26. start remote process within the context
  27. How to run powershell command in batch file
  28. How can I elevate Powershell while keeping the current working directory AND maintain all parameters passed to the script?
  29. Is there a PowerShell equivalent of `paste` (i.e., horizontal file concatenation)? [duplicate]
  30. Are you able to use PtrToStringAuto to decrypt a secure string in Powershell 7 on macOS?

Leave a Comment