Calling Echo inside a function pre-pends echo string to return value in Powershell
First, PowerShell functions return all uncaptured "output". You can capture output by assigning to a variable and you can ignore output by redirecting to $null e.g.:
$arrayList.Add("hi") > $nullThis would normally output something like 0 (the index where "hi" was added) but because we redirected to $null, the output is disregarded.
Second, echo is just an alias for "Write-Output" which writes the corresponding object to the output stream. return "blah" is just a convenience which is equivalent to:
Write-Output "blah"returnSo your function implementation is equivalent to this:
function EchoReturnTest(){ Write-Output "afdsfadsf" Write-Output "blah" return} If you want to "see" some info on the host console without it being considered part of the "output" of a function then use Write-Host e.g.:
function EchoReturnTest(){ Write-Host "afdsfadsf" return "blah"}Also, if you have no parameters then you don't need the parens at the end of the function name e.g. function EchoReturnTest { return 'blah' }.