Environment variables using powershell in a nutshell

Getting and setting environment variables using powershell (on windows) ע

GET

Get all environment variables stored in the operating system:

Get-ChildItem Env:

Filter only the relevant names

 Get-ChildItem Env: | Where-Object {$_.Name -like 'Program*'}

Get environment variable value

for example get the homepath value

  $env:homepath

Get environment variable which represent list (like PATH)

 $env:path -split ';'

Set

Setting and appending new variable

PS C:\Users\Sagiv>  $env:names = 'sagiv'
PS C:\Users\Sagiv>  $env:names += ';Sagiv Barhoom'
PS C:\Users\Sagiv>  $env:names -split ';'
sagiv
Sagiv Barhoom

Setting environment variable persistently

On Windows, environment variables can be defined in three scopes:

• Machine (or System) scope
• User scope
• Process scope

Lets set the environment persistently so they will remain even when close the currrent session. Use [System.Environment] class with the SetEnvironmentVariable method.

user scope

 [Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable('names','Sagiv;Sagiv Barhoom', 'user')

system scope

Note: you need premmitions to edit the registry - so you might wat to run this as admin

 [Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable('names','Sagiv;Sagiv Barhoom', 'Machine')