I'm trying to run the following script that I thought was quite simple. What am I doing wring here...
[Environment]::UserName = $username
Write-Host "The user is $username"
$from = "c:\Users\" + $username + "\favourites\*.*"
$to = "c:\test"
Write-Host "This is from dir: $from"
Write-Host "This is to dir: $to"
Copy-Item $from $to
The script does not seem to like the + $username + ...
I think you got your first line the wrong way around. Currently you're assigning an empty variable (value of it should be $null) to $Env:UserName, thus overwriting the username, not reading it.
I think it should be
$username = [Environment]::Username
or, as noted above, you can access environment variables via the special Env: drive:
$username = $Env:Username
And unrelated to your problem, just a matter of nicer code:
You can put the username directly into the string (which you seem to know, as demonstrated a line above – where you don't need a string in this case, though):
$from = "C:\Users\$username\favourites\*"
You don't need to fetch the user name at all, you can use
$Env:UserProfile
or
[Environment]::GetFolderPath([Environment+SpecialFolder]::UserProfile)
or even
[Environment]::GetFolderPath([Environment+SpecialFolder]::Favorites)
which might ultimately be what you're after, here.