Variable scoping in PowerShell

Question

A sad thing about PowerShell is that function and scriptblocks are dynamically scoped.

But there is another thing that surprised me is that variables behave as a cop

Answer 1

You can use scope modifiers or the *-Variable cmdlets.

The scope modifiers are:

• global used to access/modify at the outermost scope (eg. the interactive shell)
• script used on access/modify at the scope of the running script (.ps1 file). If not running a script then operates as global.

(For the -Scope parameter of the *-Variable cmdlets see the help.)

Eg. in your second example, to directly modify the global $array:

& {
  $global:array +="s"
  Write-Host $array
}

For more details see the help topic about_scopes.