Get the Computer Name cross-platform using Powershell

coding
2023-12-10
1 minute to read
powershell

Table of Contents

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

This post is over 12 months old, that's a long time in tech! Please be mindful of that when reading this post, young Padawan, as it could be outdated. I try to keep things up to date as much as possible. If you think something needs updating, please let me know in the comments.

Introduction

There are a few ways to get the computer name using Powershell. One way is to use the environment variable $env:COMPUTERNAME however, this doesn’t work on a Mac.

a screenshot of terminal in vscode with no value returned from the command

Other options

Here are a few options to get the computer name using Powershell that work consistently on both Windows and Mac.

MachineName property of the Environment class

[Environment]::MachineName

GetHost() method

[System.Net.Dns]::GetHostName()

Using the output

Both of these options will return the computer name as a string allowing you to pass the value into a variable.

$name = [System.Net.Dns]::GetHostName()
Write-Host "Computer name is ${name}"
> Computer name is Justin-MacStudioM2.local
$name = [System.Net.Dns]::GetHostName()
Write-Host "Computer name is ${name}"
> Computer name is Justin-MacStudioM2.local