If you’re just getting started in PowerShell, it’s possible that you haven’t bumped into this specific issue yet. Say you’ve got a variable named $user and this is how you assigned a value to it.

$user = Get-AdUser ThmsRynr

Using the Active Directory module, you got a specific user. Now, you want to report two properties back to the end user: SamAccountName and Enabled. The desired output looks like this:

The account ThmsRynr has enabled status of True.

So, you try something like this.

Write-Output "The account $user.SamAccountName has the enabled status of $user.Enabled"

And you’ll get something totally unexpected!

The account CN=ThmsRynr,OU=Users,DC=domain,DC=tld.SamAccountName has the enabled status of CN=ThmsRynr,OU=Users,DC=domain,DC=tld.Enabled

Whaaaat? That’s not what we want. What happened? It looks like I got the distinguished name of the user and then literally “.SamAccountName” and “.Enabled”. Doesn’t PowerShell know that I actually want the SamAccountName and Enabled properties?

Well, the short answer is no, PowerShell doesn’t know that. What if you had a variable $domain set to “workingsysadmin” and wanted to do Write-Output “$domain.com” to get “workingsysadmin.com” written out? PowerShell doesn’t know if you’re trying to access a property on the variable, or work with .com (or .SamAccountName or .Enabled) as a literal string.

So what do we do? We’ll use some brackets.

Write-Output "The account $($user.SamAccountName) has the enabled status of $($user.Enabled)"

This will give the desired output. What we’ve done is use $( ) to tell PowerShell that we want to evaluate the entire expression wrapped in those brackets, and use that in our string.