Dollar sign ($) in variable causes variable to not show correctly

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Question, Bug, or Feature?
Type: Bug

Enter Task Name: PowerShell

Environment

• Server - Azure Pipelines
• Agent - Hosted (vs2017-win16)

Issue Description

I’m trying to send an email that contains a URL with a $ in it but nothing I do can get the URL to show correctly in the email. After trying various escape sequences or storing the URL as a cross task variable, I discovered that even putting a $ in a cross task variable causes problems.

This problem can be seen by running these two inline PowerShell tasks:

$urlbase = 'https://foobar.blob.core.windows.net/$' + 'web/software/'
Write-Host "##vso[task.setvariable variable=DownloadURLBase;isOutput=True]$urlbase"

echo $(DownloadURL.DownloadURLBase)

The first script needs the Output Variable reference name set to DownloadURL, otherwise the second script won’t recognize the variable or display it at all, even malformed.

In the second task, I expect the log to say https://foobar.blob.core.windows.net/$web/software, but instead I see https://foobar.blob.core.windows.net//software.

I intentionally split the string in half at the dollar sign to try and prevent Azure Pipelines from performing macro processing on the token $web. But as I said, no combination of escaping, string concatenation, using single / double quotes or anything else I can think of is getting the phrase “$web” to show up in the log (and email body) as expected.

[egor-bryzgalov]

@lazarillo Thank you for the explanation. I understand your situation. So I’m closing this issue. Please feel free to create a new one if you face any problems.

[lazarillo]

Hi @egor-bryzgalov,

Sorry it took me a while to respond:

• The azure pipeline works fine. So you can close this issue.

• But to answer your follow up question: no, my password is not passed correctly, but this is a Powershell problem, not an Azure pipelines problem. I will explain it since you asked:

  • I call pytest from within the Azure Pipeline Powershell command (specifically AzureCLI@2, scriptType: 'ps').
  • From within pytest, I make a subprocess call to Powershell where I try to log in to a remote machine – the test is to ensure that IaC resources were deployed properly. I make an SSH call into a Windows machine, using Powershell.
  • There is no way to pass the variables from Powershell to Python and to Powershell again, if those variables contain special characters.
  • I have found an ugly solution by generating Powershell PSCredential object, then creating an encrypted password using ConvertFrom-SecureString, then saving that encrypted password to a file, then reading that encrypted password file using Powershell and creating a PSCredential again, then finally calling the Password attribute from the PSCredential and deleting the file with the encrypted password.

I have not been able to find a better way to deal with passing secret credentials between languages.

I am not complaining, as I said, this is not an Azure pipelines issue. It is a Powershell issue. And I found a solution. It is robust, or seems so. It is just such a hassle to do something that I felt must be fairly common.