Powershell 'x or y' assignment
There's no || short-circuit operator in PowerShell assignments, and nothing equivalent to Perl's // "defined-or" operator - but you can construct a simple null coalesce imitation like so:
function ?? { param( [Parameter(Mandatory=$true,ValueFromRemainingArguments=$true,Position=0)] [psobject[]]$InputObject, [switch]$Truthy ) foreach($object in $InputObject){ if($Truthy -and $object){ return $object } elseif($object -ne $null){ return $object } }}Then use like:
$a = ?? $b $cor, if you want to just have return anything that would have evaluated to $true like in your first example:
$a = ?? $b $c -Truthy
So a simple method for reducing this:
$a = if ($b -ne $null) { $b } else { $c }Would be to use the fact that true and false are just one or zero and could be used as an array index like so:
$a = @($c, $b)[$b -ne $null]