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...