If only power-shell was a better shell. How do you start a cli program which is not in PATH? Good luck.

You write the path to it, relative or full, just like in other shells

    c:\temp\program.exe

Now try it with a path which contains whitespace.

For those that are genuinely curious,

  & "C:\Program Files\Vendor\AwesomeVendorProgram.exe"

(yes - PS is definitely chock full of idiosyncrasies)

"c:\program files\my user name\foo bar baz.exe"

???

tab completion generally works on space-filled path/names too, at least in the last 10 years or so, when working in windows worlds.

PS interprets that as a string and echoes it.

  PS C:\Users\me> "C:\Program Files\PuTTY\plink.exe"
  C:\Program Files\PuTTY\plink.exe

I don't know what's different about your PowerShell -- I am running PS 7.2, but I type and tab complete the path to the binary and it auto prepends the ampersand for me. Embarrassingly, I never even paid attention before now, it "just works".

My actual experience is pretty much identical to bash and zsh. There's not really any additional cognitive load. Maybe the commenters in this thread aren't used to normal *NIX shells? I don't have any experience with fish or oh-my-zsh.

Oh yes, tab completion adds an ampersand automatically on mine as well. I was just pointing out that literally quoting a pathname to an executable by itself doesn't achieve the desired outcome.

Tab completion does not add it in mine.

PSVersion 7.3.3

That's really weird and I have no idea why it wouldn't be working for you.

I even went as far as to spawn the ancient version of powershell included with Windows and pwsh 7.3.4 without a profile and tab completion adds the ampersand. I do import the PSReadLine module though in my profiles so maybe that is providing the functionality and I was wrong about loading an empty profile.