PowerShell: Setting an environment variable for a single command only

Question

On Linux, I can do:

$ FOO=BAR ./myscript

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

Is something similar pos

Answer 1

Considering that CMD is the native CLI on the Windows kernel (and is still the automation interface for lots of tools), you may be executing your PowerShell script with powershell.exe from the CMD prompt or an interface that accepts CMD console statements.

If you are using the -File parameter to pass your script to powershell.exe, no other PowerShell code can be used to set an environment variable for the script to access, so instead you can set your environment variables in the CMD environment before calling powershell.exe:

> set foo=bar && powershell.exe -File .\script.ps1

A single & will also work, but will allow the command to continue if the set failed for some reason. (Is this even possible? I have no idea.)

Also, it may be safer to wrap "foo=bar" in quotes so that nothing following gets passed to set as the variable contents.