Pro Windows PowerShell

3.9. Gathering Collection Statistics

Commonly, when dealing with a big data set, we need to gather statistics that involve querying every object. This is where the Measure-Object cmdlet comes into play. It will go over a collection and calculate several of the most common statistics for a property value: count, sum, minimum, maximum, and average—with a minimal amount of code. As an example, let's collect statistics about all file sizes:

PS> dir -r | Measure-Object -property Length -min -max -average -sum


Count    : 2565
Average  : 55113.0101364522
Sum      : 141364871
Maximum  : 19622912
Minimum  : 0
Property : Length

The preceding query finds all files recursively by using the dir command's -r switch. It then loops over the result, queries each file's ...