I’ve had this happen a few times, and always wondered what was up.
Every once in a while, I’d try to run a powershell file that looked normal in my text editor, but when I ran it, would have a few extra characters in front.
This often surfaced when calling one powershell/batch file from another.
Today I copied the odd characters off the screen and searched for them on the internet.
I found this great blog post.
Basically those 3 characters I was getting were “Beginning of File” characters -something some formats handle better than others.
The solution was simple – I went into Notepad++ and changed the file encoding to “UTF-8 no BOF” and then used the convert option right under that in the menu for good measure.
Problem solved, and more importantly, I understand now why it was happening.