Other operators

PowerShell has a wide variety of operators, a few of which do not easily fall into a specific category:

• Comma: ,
• Index: [ ]
• Range: ..
• Call: &
• Format: -f
• Increment and decrement: ++ and --
• Join: -join
• Null coalescing
• Null conditional
• Pipeline chain
• Background

Each of these operators is in common use. The range operator is often used with the index operator and arrays, the call operator can run a command based on a string, the format operator can be used to build up complex strings, and so on.

Comma

The comma operator may be used to separate elements in an array. For example:

$array = 1, 2, 3, 4

If the comma operator is used before a single value (as a unary operator), it creates an array containing one element:

$array = ,1

The use of unary commas is explored again in Chapter 17, Scripts, Functions, and Script Blocks.

The index operator can be used to access the elements of an array.

Index

The...