Pro Windows PowerShell

15.1. Reading Content

Everything about a file's content in PowerShell revolves around the two cmdlets Get-Content and Set-Content. While they can get and set raw binary data, by default, they are oriented toward working with text. For example, here is how we can use Get-Content to retrieve the text stored in a sample file called test_people.txt:

PS> Get-Content .\test_people.txt
Michael Johnson
John Smith

Jane Doe

Users with a background in a different programming language may expect that Get-Content will return a string with the file contents. Not quite—the cmdlet is line oriented and returns an array of strings, each representing a line from the original text. Here is how to verify that; the result returned from Get-Content and our file is ...