I am trying to create a PowerShell script to run sp_upate_jobstep to specifically update the command field for an Agent job running a SSIS step.

The initial setup was done using the GUI in SQL Management Studio 2014.

I have noticed that when I run sp_help_job and retrieve the command field, that there is some what I would call interesting behaviour surrounding some the strings in the command. For example, if the specific value is a alphanumeric string, I get the following:

/Par SomeParameter;ABCD123

But, if there are any none alphanumeric characters, I get the following:

/Par SomeParameter;"\"ABCD_123\""

I would have only expected that kind of behaviour if the specific string had a space in it.

I have done a little bit of testing and have so far confirmed that if I run sp_update_jobstep and exclude the double quotes and the back slash for a string without spaces, such as:

/Par SomeParameter;ABCD_123

sp_update_jobstep still completes and the agent job still runs.

Is anyone able to confirm that this approach is OK? If not, can anyone confirm which scenarios I need to double quote and backslash for? Is it all non alphanumeric?

Cheers

• Edited by Hoffy73 Monday, September 14, 2015 1:49 AM

It looks like working inconsistently, I'd log it to MS Connect.

In the meanwhile, it looks like the \ may need to be checked for and removed, but it must be able to work with the quotes, check.

Thanks for your reply.  I have also discovered that if a hyphen is in the string, the string needs to be double quoted.

At this stage I am going to us a little regex match to search for non Alphanumeric characters and then double quote any string that has these.

• Edited by Hoffy73 7 hours 28 minutes ago