Powershell equivalent to $_ in bash

Question

In bash, to get argument from last command we call $_ . I have searched but couldn't find what is equivalent to bash's $_ in PowerShell ? Example:

$ mkdir 20171206
$ cd $_

Now bash current working directory would be 20171206 and I am trying to achieve same via PowerShell.

Is it possible ?

Answer 1

Apparently, $_ in bash means "last argument of previous command".

The closest approximation of that is $$ , which is defined as:

Contains the last token in the last line received by the session.

However, I don't know if that means PowerShell's $$ behaves like bash's $_ or if it behaves like bash's !$ . I think it's closer to !$ , but I'm on my Chromebook at the moment and can't confirm.

Edit: It's like !$ :

PS C:\> Get-Location > a.txt
PS C:\> $$
a.txt

So there's no direct equivalent to bash's $_ .

Keep in mind, though, that PowerShell strongly favors objects and pipes, so retaining the bash convention of thinking about everything in terms of plain text and space-delimited tokens won't serve you as well. The best way to do this in PowerShell is:

mkdir 20171206 | cd

Or, if you're not using any of the default PowerShell aliases and functions (I'm not sure what gets retained on Linux PowerShell, for example):

New-Item 20171206 -ItemType Directory | Set-Location