• VSCode Version: 1.12.2
• OS Version: Windows 10, OSX Sierra (tested both)

We use launch.json env block for configuration of software (think nconf or similar). We found this by a number of things:

• For the inspector debug protocol, process.stdout.write does not get echod to the debug console, so we switched to integratedTerminal.
• We have some config we set that are endpoints, some of these endpoints have url query params in them, thus the &

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Set bash as your integrated shell
2. Add the following env to your launch.json for a node type project

"env": {
    "foo": "bar&bar",
    "foo2": "hello"
}

3. Debug (F5) the project

Expected:
process.env.foo === "bar&bar" && process.env.foo2 === "hello"

Actual:
No environment variables from launch.json (process.env) are set.

Diagnosis:
VSCode needs to escape (quote?) the values when starting a debug target within the context of a terminal (integrated or external). When the environment variables are set, vscode does something like this on launch:

foo=bar&bar
foo2=hello

It should be something like

foo="bar&bar"
foo2="hello"

Otherwise the & is interpreted as a fork operator (for bash at-least). This would enable someone to do something like:

"env": { 
     "foo": "bar&echo hello world" 
}