What does the “@” symbol do in Powershell?

Question

I\'ve seen the @ symbol used in PowerShell to initialise arrays. What exactly does the @ symbol denote and where can I read more about it?

Answer 1

You can also wrap the output of a cmdlet (or pipeline) in @() to ensure that what you get back is an array rather than a single item.

For instance, dir usually returns a list, but depending on the options, it might return a single object. If you are planning on iterating through the results with a foreach-object, you need to make sure you get a list back. Here's a contrived example:

$results = @( dir c:\autoexec.bat)

One more thing... an empty array (like to initialize a variable) is denoted @().