How do I get the value of a registry key and ONLY the value using powershell

Question

Can anyone help me pull the value of a registry key and place it into a variable in PowerShell? So far I have used Get-ItemProperty and reg query

Answer 1

I'm not sure if this has been changed, or if it has something to do with which version of PS you're using, but using Andy's example, I can remove the -Name parameter and I still get the value of the reg item:

PS C:\> $key = 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion'
PS C:\> (Get-ItemProperty -Path $key).ProgramFilesDir
C:\Program Files


PS C:\> $psversiontable.psversion

Major  Minor  Build  Revision
-----  -----  -----  --------
2      0      -1     -1