shadcn’s preset URL and PowerShell’s love-hate relationship with &

I generated a shadcn/ui init command from the website and pasted it into Windows PowerShell. It exploded with errors like 'style' is not recognized as an internal or external command.

The preset URL had query parameters: ?base=radix&style=...&theme=...

In PowerShell, & is a statement separator — not part of the string unless you quote carefully. The shell chopped the URL and tried to run style=... as its own command.

Fix: wrap the URL so the whole thing is one argument. What worked for me was extra quoting around the URL (triple double-quotes in some examples) so the CLI receives the full string.

pnpm dlx shadcn@latest create --preset """https://ui.shadcn.com/init?base=radix&style=maia&...""" --template next

This is not shadcn being picky — it is shell parsing. Same class of problem shows up with curl and long URLs on Windows.

If a command mysteriously treats chunks of your URL as commands, assume quoting first.