Using Powershell environmental variables as strings when outputting files

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js2010’s answer shows the effective solution: use "..."-quoting, i.e. an expandable string explicitly.

It is a good habit to form to use "..." explicitly around command arguments that are strings containing variable references (e.g. "$HOME/projects") or subexpressions (e.g., "./folder/$(Get-Date -Format yyyy-MM)")

While such compound string arguments generally do not require double-quoting[1] – because they are implicitly treated as if they were "..."-enclosed – in certain cases they do, and when they do is not obvious and therefore hard to remember:

This answer details the surprisingly complex rules, but here are two notable pitfalls if you do not use "...":

  • If a compound argument starts with a subexpression ($(...)), its output is passed as a separate argument; e.g. Write-Output $(Get-Location)/folder passes two arguments to Write-Output: the result of $(Get-Location) and literal /folder

  • If a compound argument starts with a variable reference and is followed by what syntactically looks like either (a) a property access (e.g., $PSVersionTable.PsVersion) or (b) a method call (e.g., $PSHome.Tolower()) it is executed as just that, i.e. as an expression (rather than being considered a variable reference followed by a literal part).

    • Aside #1: Such an argument then isn’t necessarily a string, but whatever data type the property value or method-call return value happens to be.

    • Aside #2: A compound string that starts with a quoted string (whether single- or double-quoted) does not work, because the quoted string at the start is also considered an expression, like property access and method calls, so that what comes after is again passed as separate argument(s). Therefore, you can only have a compound strings consisting of a mix of quoted and unquoted substrings if the compound string starts with an unquoted substring or a non-expression variable reference.[2]

The latter is what happened in this case:

  • Unquoted $env:computername.csv was interpreted as an attempt to access a property named csv on the object stored in (environment) variable $env:computername, and since the [string] instance stored there has no csv property, the expression evaluated to $null.

  • By forcing PowerShell to interpret this value as an expandable string via "...", the usual interpolation rules apply, which means that the .csv is indeed treated as a literal (because property access requires use of $(...) in expandable strings).

[1] Quoting is required for strings that contain metacharacters such as spaces.
For values to be treated verbatim, '...' quoting is the better choice (see the bottom section of this answer for an overview of PowerShell string literals).
Also, using neither double- nor single-quoting and individually `-escaping metacharacters is another option (e.g. Write-Output C:\Program` Files.

[2] For instance, Write-Output a"b`t"'`c' and Write-Output $HOME"b`t"'`c' work as intended, whereas Write-Output "b`t"'`c' and Write-Output $HOME.Length"b`t"'`c' do not (the latter two each pass 3 arguments). The workaround is to either use a single "..." string with internal `-escaping as necessary (e.g. Write-Output "${HOME}b`t``c") or to use string-concatenation expression with + enclosed in (...) (e.g. Write-Output ($HOME + "b`t" + '`c'))

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