I created this function in the .ps1 profile for Windows PowerShell:
function sshpc ([int]$port = 8888) {
ssh -fNL [int]$port:localhost:[int]$port pc
}
However, the port forwading command does not work. It prints the message:
Bad local forwarding specification '[Int][Int]8888'
But running the command ssh -fNL 8888:localhost:8888 pc works fine.
How can I make this work?
What I tried:
I tried using the parameter definitions: ($port), ([int]$port), ($port = 8888) but these also fail.
This function works fine:
function sshpc {
ssh -fNL 8888:localhost:8888 pc
}
[int]$port:localhost:[int]$port
You cannot use casts this way, and they're also not necessary, given that you can only ever pass strings as arguments to external programs (aside from that, $port already is of type [int]).
Instead, use an (implicit) expandable string to compose your argument:
ssh -fNL ${port}:localhost:${port}
${port}:localhost:${port} is implicitly treated as if it were enclosed in "...", i.e. as an expandable (interpolating) string .
In other words: "${port}:localhost:${port}" works too, and you may prefer it for conceptual clarity and to avoid cases where unquoted arguments aren't implicitly treated as expandable strings.
Write-Output "$baseName.txt" appends literal .txt to the value of $baseName, whereas Write-Output $baseName.txt tries to access a (nonexistent) .txt property on the object stored in $baseName; see this answer for background information.Note the need to enclose the variable name, port, in {...} so as to delimit it; without it, the : would be considered part of the variable reference, making $port the a scope or namespace prefix of the following variable reference, which expands to the empty string due to non-existence: $port:localhost.
${port} reference, but was chosen for symmetry here.