PowerShell Tutorial

Print Environment Variables in PowerShell

August 3, 2022

In fact, I wrote this print environment variables in PowerShell tutorial after getting annoyed from echo and set commands output. Additionally, You can see readability issue with the list all environment variables from the command line tutorial outputs.

Print Environment Variables in PowerShell

Specifically, You will love the strength of PowerShell when writing PowerShell scripts or small code snippets. To illustrate, I am writing few example commands that you can use in PowerShell to list all environment variables.

Environment Variable in PowerShell

Firstly, You can use $env: variable in PowerShell to list all environment variables in PowerShell. Further, You cannot use echo %PATH% command in PowerShell because it will only display %PATH% in console. Of course, we have different PowerShell syntax to display environment variables paths, here is the command.

echo $env:Path
Print Environment Variables in PowerShell, $env:Path Command

Of course, you can ask that what is the difference between Command Prompt and PowerShell output? Well, I displayed the results before formatting the output.

Split Semicolon Separated String with PowerShell

Let’s start to check the power of PowerShell and I am using Windows PowerShell ISE for easiness. Similarly, You can see the below output from the echo $env:Path.Split(";") command.

$env:Path.Split(";")
Print Environment Variables in PowerShell, $env Path Command with Split Semicolon

PowerShell Commands to List Environment Variables

Further, I am writing few other PowerShell commands to list environment variables.

echo $env:Path Command

Firstly, You can use the echo command in PowerShell but I called it extra code because you can directly print the variables in PowerShell.

echo $env:Path

Get-Item env:Path Command

Secondly, If you are coding lover and love to write more code to do the task, you can use Get-Item env:Path Command for this.

Get-Item Env:\Path | ForEach-Object {
    $name = $_.Name
    $_.Value -split ';' | Where-Object { $_ } | Select-Object @{n="Name";e={$name}}, @{n="Value";e={$_}}
}

Get-ChildItem env:Path Command

Thirdly, You can use Get-ChildItem env:Path Command command to do the same but with some extra code. You will find it similar to Get-Item env:Path Command.

Get-ChildItem Env:\Path | ForEach-Object {
    $name = $_.Name
    $_.Value -split ';' | Where-Object { $_ } | Select-Object @{n="Name";e={$name}}, @{n="Value";e={$_}}
}

Variables in PowerShell

Additionally, you can see that we used dollar sign ($) as our starting command, it is called variable in PowerShell.

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