PowerShell: Output the Result of a Command and Assign it to a Variable in One Line

As of today, there is one month left until the PowerShell Summit North America 2014. I tweeted something out last night and thought I would write a quick blog about it since I often find myself looking for a tweet months later when I can’t remember how I did something that I previously tweeted out.

This tweet used all 140 characters that twitter allows:

This portion of the command is assigned to a variable named $i (technically it’s assigned to a variable named “i”):

It determines the amount of time until 9am on April 28, 2014 in the GMT -7 timezone (the current timezone for Seattle) so you can run this command from any time zone and it will display accurate information.

Here I’ve assigned the value to the variable $i and displayed the value of the days property, all in one line:

At this point $i contains the following value:

When you surround it by quotation marks you end up with a hot mess:

Enclosing the command in dollar sign parenthesis resolves the issue:

Now you can use the $i variable on the same line to display the hours in addition to the days since you wouldn’t want to show up to the PowerShell Summit too many hours early:

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