Learn Windows PowerShell in a Month of Lunches, Second Edition

Chapter 9. The pipeline, deeper

At this point, you’ve learned to be pretty effective with PowerShell’s pipeline. Running commands (like Get-Process | Sort VM -desc | ConvertTo-HTML | Out-File procs.html) is powerful, accomplishing in one line what used to take several lines of script. But you can do even better. In this chapter, we’ll dig deeper into the pipeline and uncover some of its most powerful capabilities.

9.1. The pipeline: enabling power with less typing

One of the reasons we like PowerShell so much is that it enables us to be more effective administrators without having to write complex scripts, like we used to have to do in VBScript. But the key to powerful one-line commands lies in the way the PowerShell pipeline works.

Let us ...