What is the Powershell ${^} variable?

Question

I recently learned that you can use special characters in PowerShell variables, e.g.: ${hello world!}, but then I stumbled across this:

${^}

What does it do? I first thought it referenced the newest created variable, but it does other stuff I haven't really figured out.

Answer 1

The documentation says:

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

Examples:

dir c:\windows 🡒 dir

0..9 🡒 0

&{ dir } 🡒 &

It was likely introduced to get the last command used (dir, copy, rm, ...), but in reality that will only work for the most simplest cases, and thus it's not very useful.

The corresponding $$ returns the last token from the last line.

Note: The curly braces {} are only necessary for variable names containing characters which are not allowed in variables, except automatic variables (look here). In this case, you can omit them:

$^

Answer 2

It shows the first word/token in the last executed command.