How to properly escape a quoted command after a line continuation?

Question

Running the following example batch file,

echo foo &&^
"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe"

...produces the following output:

foo
'"C:\Program' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

What am I missing?

EDIT

As tagged, this question is dealing with Windows (XP) batch files.

Answer 1

Try removing the ampersands.

echo foo ^ 
"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe"

I get

C:\Users\keith\Desktop>echo foo
foo

C:\Users\keith\Desktop>"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe"

edit - I didn't have @echo off at the top of my batch file.

Answer 2

You need to quote the path if it contains spaces; I'm not quite sure what language you're dealing with, but basically you need:

""C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe""

Answer 3

Try putting && on the second line.

echo foo ^
&& "C:\Program files\internet explorer\iexplore.exe"

Edit: As the Question asks, this command must be run in a batch file. It works from the batch file but works incorrectly at the command line!

Answer 4

Quotation marks do seem to be properly parsed by cmd.exe when they are preceded by conditional processing symbols (i.e., &, &&, ||).

As a work-around you can use a path that contains short names only without white space characters:

echo foo &&^
C:\Progra~1\Intern~1\iexplore.exe

Or use a helper variable with delayed variable expansion:

setlocal enabledelayedexpansion

set "IE_EXE=C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe"

echo foo &&^
!IE_EXE!

Answer 5

This seems to work too:

echo foo &&^
cmd /c "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe"