Get the Computer Name cross-platform using Powershell

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

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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.

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