Recently I've started fiddling around with PowerShell, and I bumped into an issue with running .jar files. Simply put, I'm using plantuml and I'd like to simply have a "plantuml" command to run it. Normally, running the program would be done by typing. java -jar C:\Users\Name\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Commands\plantuml.jar. This is of course quite a handful, and I'd like to shorten this to simply plantuml.
My current work-around is the following function:
function plantuml($UmlPath, $ImgPath) {
java -jar C:\Users\Name\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Commands\plantuml.jar $UmlPath $ImgPath
}
However, I cannot pass any parameters to the .jar file like this, because Powershell intercepts them and interprets them as function parameters. A current workaround for this is by wrapping them in quotation marks, but I find this ugly and I often forget.
Is there any way to simply be able to type plantuml so that PowerShell expands it to java -jar C:\Users\Name\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Commands\plantuml.jar? The only similar question I found was this one, but it doesn't appear to have an actual answer.
I don't have plantuml or anything similar to test with, but you can get all the parameters passed to a function with the $args variable, so this approach might work:
function plantuml {
# Array of your default arguments to Java.exe to start plantuml
$arguments = @('-jar',
'C:\Users\Name\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Commands\plantuml.jar')
# All arguments passed to this function, umlpath, imgpath, and anything else
# are in the special variable $args, add those into the array as well.
$arguments += $args
Start-Process Java -ArgumentList $arguments
}