Invocation in PowerShell not working

matejhowell has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Has anyone ran into problems with Windows PowerShell and Perl? I am running ActiveState's 5.10, build 1002, on Win XP SP2, with PS 1.0 installed. When I run the command

perl -e "$_ = 1"

I get the following message:

syntax error at -e line 1, near "="
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.
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On MS Dos, this works fine. Any thoughts?

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Re: Invocation in PowerShell not working by NetWallah (Canon) on Mar 13, 2008 at 17:55 UTC
$_ is being interpolated by the powershell (it means The current pipeline object, used in script block). Try it with single-quotes. I have see some conflicting references, saying that non-interpolated strings are enclosed in backticks (They call them Apostrophes) or this character ТТ, but single-quotes should work. "As you get older three things happen. The first is your memory goes, and I can't remember the other two... " - Sir Norman Wisdom	[reply]
Re: Invocation in PowerShell not working by matejhowell (Initiate) on Mar 14, 2008 at 12:19 UTC
Thanks! That did it!	[reply]
Re: Invocation in PowerShell not working by moritz (Cardinal) on Mar 13, 2008 at 17:21 UTC
I have no experience with PowerShell, but if it has similar interpolation syntax to unix shells, you have to use ~~double~~single quotes: `perl -e '$_ = 1'` In unix shells variables are interpolated into double quotes, and since you probably have no variable `$_` defined in your shell, the one-liner that perl sees looks l ike this: `= 1;` Update: s/double/single/, thank you BrowserUk	[reply] [d/l] [select]