"drush up" fails with "pm-updatestatus failed."

Question

When I execute drush up, it returns the following error message.

The command could not be executed successfully (returned: The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect, code: 1) pm-updatestatus failed.

drush pm-updatestatus runs without errors.

Similarly, "C:\\Users\\user1\\AppData\\Roaming\\Composer\\vendor\\drush\\drush\\drush" --backend=2 --verbose --debug --root="C:\\website\\drupal7" --uri=http://default pm-updatestatus 2>&1, which I extracted from the debug output of drush -d up (see below) also successfully runs.

What could I try?

The debug output is the following.

Calling hook drush_pm_updatecode_validate [11.27 sec, 17.04 MB]
Returned from hook drush_pm_updatecode_validate [11.27 sec, 17.04 MB] Calling hook drush_pm_updatecode [11.27 sec, 17.05 MB]
Cache MISS cid: 8.1.2-alias-path--59067c616e8e4f3b7078e0502d77bf35 [11.27 sec, 17.06 MB] Backend invoke:
"C:\Users\user1\AppData\Roaming\Composer\vendor\drush\drush\drush" --backend=2 --verbose --debug --root="C:\website\drupal7" --uri=http://default pm-updatestatus 2>&1 [11.61 sec, 17.09 MB] "C:\Users\user1\AppData\Roaming\Composer\vendor\drush\drush\drush" --backend=2 --verbose --debug --root="C:\website\drupal7" --uri=http://default pm-updatestatus 2>&1 [11.61 sec, 17.09 MB] The command could not be executed successfully (returned: The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect., code: 1) [11.79 sec, 17.09 MB] pm-updatestatus failed. [11.79 sec, 17.08 MB]

I am using Drush 8.1.2, Drupal 7.50 running on Windows 7, PHP 5.6.23, and Apache 2.4.23.

Answer 1

I was able to fix the problem by editing the file /path/to/drush/includes/exec.inc and changing line 331 from

return _drush_escapeshellarg_windows($arg, $raw);

to

return _drush_escapeshellarg_windows($arg, TRUE);

as described by peterromero here https://github.com/drush-ops/drush/issues/2152

Answer 2

My issue went away when I unlinked my PHP@5.6 and linked PHP@7.2 that MAMP is using. Then I run source ~/.bash_profile (didn't need to reload Terminal).Restarted apache.

Answer 3

In my case I was getting a Drupal error

Error: Call to undefined function Drush\UpdateService\simplexml_load_file() in                 Drush\UpdateService\Project::getInstance() (line 74 of phar:///usr/local/bin/drush/vendor/composer/../../lib/

which indicated that the php-xml extension was not installed.

sudo aptitude install php7.2-xml

fixed the problem.