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Tip of the Day: Using environment variables with Windows PowerShell

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Today’s Tip…

Getting environment variables in Windows has always been easy. Just bring up a CMD prompt and type ‘set’.

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But what if I want to use an environment variable in Windows PowerShell? That’s easy too! Simply use ‘$env:<environment variable name>’. For example, if I wanted a variable that contains my computer name, I could use ‘$env:comptuername’ like this…

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This will save me steps when scripting as I don’t have to query for my computer name and create a new variable for it. I can just use ‘$env:computername’. This works with all the environment variables.

Neat, huh?

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 14, 2014
    That is neat. How do I get a list of available environment variables?
  • Anonymous
    January 12, 2015
    Get-ChildItem Env:

    http://windowsitpro.com/powershell/powershell-one-liner-getting-local-environment-variables
  • Anonymous
    December 16, 2015
    How do i get a variables content from another variable.
    Ex: $env:($env:)
    • Anonymous
      December 04, 2017
      Hi, did you get the answer to this?
    • Anonymous
      January 16, 2018
      We reached out to the Product Group on this one. They don't understand what you are trying to do. Can you provide additional information? The only thing that they thought might work is setting $A to the value of $B.
  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2017
    PERFECT!!!
  • Anonymous
    December 28, 2017
    How do we get in touch with you? I know you mentioned that you don't look at old posts and I had a question about breaking the 2 tb barrier. I have tried everything but still believe that there is a way around it. I did the GPT and partition route but still running into problems. Sorry to ask on this blog.