rules/windows-spawn.md
Applies to anything that spawns a child process with arguments — spawn_streaming, socket_firewall (node-pty), and any new caller. All of them go through src/ipc/utils/windows_command.ts, which is the single source of truth so quoting/security fixes apply everywhere.
Electron's will-quit event does not await promises. Cleanup invoked there
must perform process-tree discovery and signal delivery synchronously; an async
tree-kill helper can leave grandchildren reparented and running after Electron
exits. Keep Windows quit cleanup on direct taskkill.exe argv and avoid
cmd.exe for this path.
.cmd shimresolveWindowsExecutableName appends .cmd to any command without a . in it (npm → npm.cmd), because that's what the command really is on Windows. This means node, npx, and npm all take the cmd.exe path, not the direct-exec path — only a name with an extension (node.exe) passes through unchanged. Assuming otherwise is an easy way to write a test that asserts the wrong branch.
% and newlines cannot be passed through cmd.exe.cmd/.bat shims can't be exec'd directly, so they're routed through cmd.exe /d /s /c with a single command string. Quoting each argument preserves shell metacharacters (&, |, <, >, ^, !, (), spaces, quotes) — which is what lets a Playwright grep regex like (adds|removes) item survive — but two things quoting cannot contain:
%: cmd.exe expands %VAR% even inside double quotes, and %% only escapes inside a batch file, not on a command line.cmd.exe treats newlines as command separators inside double quotes.quoteWindowsCmdArg therefore throws on both rather than silently rewriting the value into a different command. Don't "fix" a throw by stripping the characters — a caller passing model- or user-supplied text (grep patterns, filenames) needs to fail loudly, not run a mangled or injected command. If a %-bearing argument must genuinely be supported, it needs a non-cmd.exe transport, not more escaping.