TIL escaping things for cmd.exe is sometimes impossible

like, if you have a file:

C:\folder with spaces (And parens)\fancy!!! chars'`@;,[]{}().txt

the only way to get that escaped as a subshell in bash is like:

cat "$(wslpath $'C:\\folder with spaces (And parens)\\fancy!!! chars\'`@;,[]{}().txt')"

and i'm trying to write something that will throw this into bash.exe -ic, but how the heck do you escape it?

backslashes won't do it, carets don't do it

looking it up, turns out you can't??

i even wrote a C# program to use its built-in argument parsing, so *it* could figure out passing that as a single argument to wsl bash

it couldn't do it either

i did figure out a way to do it though! and that way is very bad, hee

i base64 the whole command line, and run it in a subshell, because that doesn't require any double-quotes or escaping magic cmd-side

it's unfortunate that i'm relying on base64 existing in any wsl that this is used in, but i guess i'm already relying on bash as it is anyway, soooo....