PowerShell ISE Clear Variables without restarting

PowerShell ISE and Variables values

While it is not my go-to editor (more on this in a future post) sometimes I am forced to work and debug from an ISE session which has the bad habit of maintaining variables values between script executions.

This can create issues especially while developing/changing a script and executing it multiple times and, trust me, it can be really difficult to troubleshoot. I know I’ve been there already.

Luckily enough there is an easy solution to this which is running the following command which will clear all variables stored in the session

Remove-Variable * -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

This will take care of clearing all stored variables so we can be sure we script will not inherit any value from a previous run.

PowerShell ISE Errors and Modules

What I just described also applies to the the Error buffer which can similarly be cleared with the following command

$error.Clear()

Taking this a step further we can even remove any module loaded by our script with the following command

Remove-Module *

Putting all this together we can use a single command to have a fresh ISE Session

Remove-Variable * -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue; Remove-Module *; $error.Clear();