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Hex to Decimal Conversion - PowerShell 5

For some reason, when converting some values in PowerShell from Hex to Decimal, I get incorrect value.

For example: - Type 0xC0000000 then hit enter, you'll get -1073741824 which is incorrect, the right value is 3221225472. The answer given is the value for the negative Hex number I entered FFFFFFFFC0000000

I thought this could be an interpretation issue so I explicitly asked to convert the value to from Hex to Base10 (Decimal), I still got the same incorrect answer -1073741824:

[Convert]::ToString(0xc0000000,10)

Why does PowerShell interpret 0xc0000000 as the negative for the Hex number c0000000? am I missing something here?

Solution

  • That's a PowerShell gotcha (exists in earlier versions too). The value is interpreted as a signed integer when you actually want it to be an unsigned integer. You need to do the conversion like this to get around the issue:

    [uint32]"0xC0000000"