How to use a variable as part of the path of a calling program

Question

As a new PowerShell user, I am planning to call a local program whose path is not in the PATH environment variable. When calling the program the relative or full path of the program has to be given, e.g. .\Users\xxx\Downloads\program_name\bin\prog. However, as this path is way long and sometimes might be changed, so as a Linux Shell script programmer I would like to use a variable in the path, for instance .\$prog_home\bin\prog.

Hereby my question is how to initialize this variable so that it can be used as I assumed beforehands? I tried to initialized the variable in such way -

$prog_home="User\xxx\Downloads\program_name"

Unfortunately, this really can not work at all like in Linux Shell

sodawillow · Accepted Answer · 2016-12-20 13:16:24Z

2

Please consider to use the Join-Path cmdlet to combine a path. There is also a builtin USERPROFILE environment variable which you can use. This is how you could do it:

$prog_home = Join-Path $env:USERPROFILE 'program_name'
$prog = Join-Path $prog_home '\bin\prog.exe'
& $prog #execute it

edited Dec 20, 2016 at 13:16

sodawillow

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answered Dec 20, 2016 at 12:00

Martin Brandl

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4 Comments

Walter Mitty Over a year ago

It looks to me as though you typed $prog where you meant $prog_home at one point.

Martin Brandl Over a year ago

@WalterMitty You are right. Fortunately sodawillow fixed it for me :-)

Rui Over a year ago

@MartinBrandl and alo sodawillow, great! After trying your code, I understood the working principle of Powershell a lot better now :) Thanks a lot!

Martin Brandl Over a year ago

You are welcome and thanks for the accept. If you wan't to persist such variables in your profile (so when you start powershell you already have $prog set, take a look at PowerShell profiles.

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