How to read a TRUE or FALSE from a .conf file with Powershell?

Question

I am trying to build a small program that shutdown WSL and other programs that are running WSL in it like Windows Terminal.

I want the user to be able to set TRUE or FALSE in a .conf file variable depending on if the Windows Terminal wants to be closed or not by checking it with a conditional but when i add the if statement checking for the variable the program just simply doesn't work.Any ideas on where i could be making the mistake?

Here is the code:

# Gets the settings from the conig file
Foreach ($i in $(Get-Content stop.conf))
{
    Set-Variable -Name $i.split("=")[0] -Value $i.split("=",2)[1]
}

# Cheks for open processes and saves it to a variable
$IDE = Get-Process $EDITOR -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
$windowsTerminal = Get-Process $windowsterminal -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
$linuxsys = Get-Process $DISTRO -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

# OPTIONAL
# Checks if Windows Terminal is open and closes it
if ($WINTERMINAL -eq $true)
{
    if ($windowsTerminal)
    {
        # Try gratefully first
        $windowsTerminal.CloseMainWindow()
        Sleep 5
        if (!$windowsTerminal.HasExited)
        {
            $windowsTerminal | Stop-Process -Force
        }
    }
}

Just in case the .conf file looks like this:

DISTRO=ubuntu2004
EDITOR=code
WINTERMINAL=$true

Answer 1

Since you're reading from a plain-text file, your dynamically created variables based on the file's content will contain string values.

Thus, use a verbatim (single-quoted) string ('...') to check for a string with verbatim value $true (as opposed to the automatic (built-in) $true variable (conceptually, a constant), which is a Boolean)^[1]:

if ($WINTERMINAL -eq '$true') # Note the '...' quoting; ditto for '$false'

If you want to be more flexible and also accept verbatim true and yes (or any case variation thereof - note that PowerShell is generally case-insensitive by default):

if ($WINTERMINAL -in '$true', 'true', 'yes')

---

Note:

• While using JSON as your config file's format, as suggested, would indeed give you support for a few data types (other than string), including Booleans, maintaining JSON files manually is error-prone.

• A friendlier format that is also type-aware, which PowerShell does not natively support, however, is TOML, which you can think of as a typed superset of INI files (.ini)

  • GitHub issue #9035, which was declined, asked for INI-file support, in the context of which TOML support was discussed too.
  • As of this writing, there are no TOML modules in the PowerShell Gallery.
    • You can use a .NET library such as Tomlyn directly, but use of NuGet packages in PowerShell is currently cumbersome, unfortunately - see this answer for an example.

---

^{[1] When you coerce a Boolean to a string, such as in an -eq operation with a string as the LHS, $true and $false become verbatim strings True and False, respectively. E.g., 'True' -eq $true is true.}

Answer 2

I agree with @santiago-squarzon that a .JSON file would be easier here. Part of the reason it would be easier here would be that you would automatically get support for certain data types, like Boolean.

However, I think your code could work with a couple of minors changes:

# Gets the settings from the conig file
Foreach ($i in $(Get-Content stop.conf))
{
    # Change one, using $executionContext here (speed)
    $varName, $varValue = $i.Split("=", 2)
    $executionContext.SessionState.PSVariable.Set($varName, $varValue)
}

# Cheks for open processes and saves it to a variable
$IDE = Get-Process $EDITOR -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
$windowsTerminal = Get-Process $windowsterminal -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
$linuxsys = Get-Process $DISTRO -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

# At this point, your variables are all strings.  There's two ways forward from here:
# 1. Make it an actual boolean
# 2. Match potential yes values (I'll do #2)
if ($WINTERMINAL -match "^(?>$true|yes|y)$")
{
    if ($windowsTerminal)
    {
        # Try gratefully first
        $windowsTerminal.CloseMainWindow()
        Sleep 5
        if (!$windowsTerminal.HasExited)
        {
            $windowsTerminal | Stop-Process -Force
        }
    }
}

The reason I'm choosing to match instead of [bool]::Parse($winTerminal) is that your original code had a truth value of "Yes", not "True". If you want to provide a more human-friendly option than "true" or "false", this is the way to go.