Parameters add flexibility

Executing a series of commands can be useful, but often you will want to execute the scripts and also provide some input—specific details about the execution of the script. One way to do this is to use parameters. Parameters are a way for you to provide the values that you want to be used in a script at execution time. For example, you might find that when you create a new directory, you immediately want to change to that directory. We started the chapter with a similar script that created a folder named with the current date, but because the script determined the folder name, we didn't need to provide any input. For this script, we don't know when we write the script what the name of the folder should be, but we will when we run it.

Parameters for scripts are specified in a Param() statement at the beginning of the script. The names of the parameters are variables and start with a dollar sign ($). You aren't limited to a single parameter, either. You can include...