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I thought I knew quite a lot about Batch and CMD, but the following is puzzling me. So far so good, but I really don't understand why I'm getting... ...the moment I pipe the outcome of the IF-statement to another command.
I've tried to escape the inner parentheses, but to no avail.

In the meantime an alternative that does work for me: Bonus question regarding this alternative: Only with the 2nd ECHO does the 3rd-party-command receive "test". In all other cases it's "test " (with an extra space at the end).
With parentheses around the ECHO-command why does it still put out "test "?

It doesn't work along with EXIST while it works with other IF statements. Seems to be one of many other cmd bugs.

That the cmd adds a space before the closing parenthesis is a known behavior. Run your last line with ECHO turned ON in order to see the command line which is actually executed.

Steffen

So it's actually a bug. I see.
Thanks for your quick reply.

Hi Reino,

when using a pipe, both sides are executed in a subshell.
For doing this, the commands are rewritten and executed with cmd.exe, but "IF" statements frequently fails to be rewritten correctly.
Debug syntax errors in subshell code
Why does delayed expansion fail when inside a piped block of code?

It can be solved by adding an escaped space and escape the closing parenthesis.

That's some weird stuff, but it works. Thanks, jeb!