'az pipelines variable update' fails on special characters (^, >)

[fnbk]

Describe the bug

az pipelines variable update has difficulties dealing with some special characters:

works

$key="semver"
$value="~1.0.0" 

az pipelines variable update --project $projectName --pipeline-name $pipelineName --name --value $key $value

errors

$key="semver"
$value="^1.0.0" # caret (^) will be ignored in the UI frontend
$value=">=1.0.0" # error: (>) leads to an error

az pipelines variable update --project $projectName --pipeline-name $pipelineName --name --value $key $value

Environment Summary

Windows-10-10.0.19041-SP0
Python 3.6.6
Installer: MSI

azure-cli 2.3.1

Extensions:
aks-preview 0.4.66
azure-devops 0.18.0
azure-iot 0.9.3
storage-preview 0.2.12

[sprice-reba]

I ran into this today when using the az cli with PowerShell.

I was able to work around it by enclosing the value string in double quotes inside of single quotes. eg '"value"'

Hope this helps anyone who runs into the same issue.

Example Usage

az pipelines variable-group variable update --group-id $variableGroupId --name $variableName --secret true --project $azureDevOpsProject --org $azureDevOpsOrganisationUrl --value '"ValueWithSpecialChars~^>*@"'