Pro Windows PowerShell

3.8. Grouping Objects

Dealing with many objects often involves classifying them into several groups. PowerShell makes that very easy to do with its Group-Object cmdlet. The simplest and most common scenario is to split a collection into groups according to a property value. Here is how we can get a report of all services split into groups according to their status:

PS> Get-Service | Group-Object Status

Count Name                      Group
----- ----                      -----
   73 Running                   {AeLookupSvc, Appinfo, AudioEndpointBuil...
   79 Stopped                   {ALG, AppMgmt, aspnet_state, Browser...}

The result is a collection of GroupInfo objects. We can get each of them and query it for the actual objects that belong to the group by accessing the GroupInfo Group property:

PS> (Get-Service | Group-Object ...