Windows PowerShell™ 2 For Dummies®

Chapter 7. Working on a Pipeline

In This Chapter

• Using pipelines to become more efficient

• Piping commands together

• Working with data and displaying results

If you take a moment to look around you, I'm sure that you can find a lot of inefficiencies. I see some of the biggest inefficiencies when I'm dealing with any kind of government agency. I'm not a political kind of person, but having worked with various government entities throughout my career, I can say that the bureaucracy that's designed to create clear lines of responsibility and authority also typically creates some very inefficient processes as a side effect.

Typically, getting anything done involves going to one department, filing some paperwork, getting something back, and then going to another department and filling out some more paperwork (usually, with the same information) — and this process can go on and on. Departments and even agencies rarely share information. Wouldn't it be nice if you could submit a request somewhere, and that request would automatically flow through all the relevant departments or agencies and give you your results at the end? This scenario is a pipe dream for most of us. Luckily, though, it's closer to reality in Windows PowerShell. You don't have to deal with the same kinds of problems because you can take advantage of pipelines.

In this chapter, you see how information is passed from one PSH command to another using pipelines. Unlike pipelines of the past, PSH pipelines are much more sophisticated ...