PowerShell: Setting an environment variable for a single command only

windows powershell scripting variables environment
miracle2k picture miracle2k · Sep 14, 2009 · Viewed 44.9k times · Source

On Linux, I can do:

$ FOO=BAR ./myscript

to call "myscript" with the environment variable FOO being set.

Is something similar possible in PowerShell, i.e. without having to first set the variable, call the command, and then unset the variable again?

To be more clear about my use case - I don't want to use this as part of a script. Rather, I have a third-party script whose behavior I can control using environment variables, but, in this case, not command line arguments. So being able to alternate between typing

$ OPTION=1 ./myscript

and

$ ./myscript

would just be very handy.

Answer

Keith Hill picture Keith Hill · Sep 14, 2009

Generally, it would be better to pass info to the script via a parameter rather than a global (environment) variable. But if that is what you need to do you can do it this way:

$env:FOO = 'BAR'; ./myscript

The environment variable $env:FOO can be deleted later like so:

Remove-Item Env:\FOO

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