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What's wrong with .\example.exe? Or .example.exe, .$exampleWithPath for PS1 files? Just examples that I see in the wild

Didn't work for me, I think you have to prepend with a & so

& notepad.exe

Which isn't complicated I agree but annoyed me.

What version of Powershell are you using?

Just typing "notepad" is enough to launch it. The problems with powershell and executables only really come in to play when argument passing, where some escaping is necessary.

3, we still have win7 at work.

You can download and install PowerShell Core 6 completely side-by-side with Windows PowerShell 3.0. We even have a portable ZIP you can drop down wherever: https://github.com/powershell/powershell/releases

The only reason to use iex is if the thing you're trying to execute is not directly the name of the process. So you need & for `&'notepad'` and `&$string_variable` but not `notepad`

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