The coworker that sits next to me at the office has upped his PowerShell game tremendously since he’s moved up from Operations to the Windows Team. He often has well-thought-out questions and he’s long shown a great desire to learn about PowerShell. It’s addictive and rewarding, so there’s no question as to why. He may not know it, but I look forward to the questions. The need for PowerShell answers here and there keeps me fresh, and so while it benefits him, it benefits me too.

As he does, he asked a question recently. It was in regard to the Confirm parameter. Why does it need the colon and $false to not be true? Why does it need to be written like this: -Confirm:$false? Why can’t it be written like this: -Confirm $false?

If a switch parameter is included, then its value is $true. If it’s not included, its value is $false. Knowing that alone, makes it clear that we’d have to force something to be false if its default is $true. Okay, knowing that, why can’t we do this then: -Confirm $false?

It’s got to do with the PowerShell parser. It’s how the engine evaluates the statement. Remember, it’s a switch parameter. The parameter is either included or it’s not. The switch parameter is inherently never dependent on a value to be included with it. It doesn’t work that way. The PowerShell engine will see -Confirm and make it $true, long before it even sees the $false value. The colon and value being attached to the Confirm parameter ensures the parser knows you want it to be of that specific value.