Can I construct the name of a Powershell environment variable?

Question

I would like to dynamically construct the name of an environment variable. I tried this:

$partition = $env:partition
$desiredvariable = "abc_$partition"
$desiredvalue = $env:$desiredvariable

This doesn't seem to work. Can this be done?

Thanks

Mathias R. Jessen · Accepted Answer · 2015-07-22 20:05:09Z

4

Yes you can!

Environment variables can be manipulated using the [System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable() method:

$SomeName = "test"
[System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable($SomeName,"value")

You can then access it like normally:

PS C:\> $env:test
value

PS C:\> [System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable($SomeName)
value
PS C:\> [System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("test")
value

answered Jul 22, 2015 at 20:05

Mathias R. Jessen

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Mike Shepard · Accepted Answer · 2015-07-22 20:34:42Z

2

You were close.

$t='tmp'
dir env:$t

Output:

Name Value
---- ----- TMP C:\Users\ESDADMMS\AppData\Local\Temp

answered Jul 22, 2015 at 20:34

Mike Shepard

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