Yes the shell interprets it first. `cmd.exe` does very little processing and mostly passes on the literal string. But what it does do can be confusing (e.g. `^` is an escape character which is annoying if you were trying to pass in a regex).

In powershell you can use `--%` to pass a literal string as the command line. This is useful for applications that don't use the standard C/C++ parsing rules.

See: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft...