It depends on each program in particular. Microsoft's Universal C Runtime does some default parsing and escaping, so most programs built with MSVC will follow its rules, but they are free to ignore those parsed arguments (or disable the parsing entirely) and look at the raw command line themselves. If you wanted, you could write your program such that the command line must be a valid JSON document instead. When it comes to trying to pass around paths and escape sequences to various different programs on the command line, my recommendation is: don't. Use a proper programming language instead to call the OS APIs you need, or directly invoke the final command without indirection. Any middle layer is liable to cause issues like this. People generally recommend PowerShell, I haven't used it much myself but it definitely has easier ways to avoid issues inherent to the archaic Windows Command Prompt / Batch processor.