This just demonstrates how, when you’re used to the standard Windows command prompt, Powershell can (at times) bite you.
So I was getting some Java code configured and noticed the ant script listed a different JAVA_HOME to the one I expected. In a standard Windows command prompt I would type
echo %JAVA_HOME%
and ofcourse, expect to see the folder location. So this is what I did in Powershell and instead I just got the result %JAVA_HOME% written out.
Powershell does things differently. In this case to output environment variables we need to use
echo $Env:JAVA_HOME
Doh!
To set an environment variable in Powershell we simply type
$env:JAVA_HOME="C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_45"
References