PowerShell - Pipeline - hard coded program vs variable

Question

I'm fairly new to PowerShell. I've created a variable which contains some data which I then pass on to an email generator:

$strEmailFile = "C:\Testing\SomeTextFile.txt"

cat $strEmailFile | E:\sendmail.exe -t

My problem is I don't want to hard-code the drive for the email generating software. So I would like the code to be something like this:

$strEmailFile = "C:\Testing\SomeTextFile.txt"

$Dir = "E:"

cat $strEmailFile | $Dir + "\sendmail.exe" -t

But I keep getting the following error:

"Expressions are only allowed as the first element of a pipeline."

Is there a way for me to use the pipeline but not have to hard-code?

You don't need sendmail.exe with PowerShell when you have Send-MailMessage. — Bill_Stewart
– Bill_Stewart, Commented Mar 8, 2017 at 18:51

briantist · Accepted Answer · 2017-03-08 18:54:23Z

1

You should look into Send-MailMessage but the difference between your attempts is that the first one is an expression, and the second one is a string, and you can't pipe into a string.

But if you use the call operator & you could pipe into that:

cat $strEmailFile | & ($Dir + "\sendmail.exe") -t

Note that you need parentheses to first run the expression that concatenates the variable and the string).

answered Mar 8, 2017 at 18:54

briantist

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2 Comments

S. Hasan Over a year ago

Thank you that helped. Sorry for the delayed response

briantist Over a year ago

@S.Hasan 3 years later, you are very welcome! Thanks for the note :)

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