PowerShell is object-oriented, text being an object too. An object in PowerShell contains entities within it, which are called members. These members can be referred to using what is called the member access operator, which is nothing but a dot (.). In this recipe, we will look at picking members from within objects.

Since we are going to be dealing with members of objects, we will now look at one of the most important cmdlets in PowerShell: Get-Member.

1. We will start by gathering the properties of our home directory. The path to this is stored in the automatic variable known as $HOME:

PS> Get-Item $HOME | Get-Member

Note the TypeName of the object—the very first line—as well as the MemberType column in the table.

2. Next, check when the home directory was last written to:

PS> (Get-Item $HOME).LastWriteTime

3. Can we find out when the parent of your $HOME was created?

PS> (Get-Item $HOME).Parent | Get-Member
PS> (Get-Item $HOME).Parent.CreationTime

4. What are the members of this object?

PS> (Get-Item $HOME).Parent.CreationTime | Get-Member

5. Pick out the year:

PS> (Get-Item $HOME).Parent.CreationTime.Year

6. Next, let's use a method from within the returned object and convert it into plain text. We saw that CreationTime is a DateTime object. Let's convert that into a plain string:

PS> (Get-Item $HOME).Parent.CreationTime.ToString()

7. Find the type of object returned by the previous command. Press the up arrow key to bring back the previous command and pipe its output to Get-Member. Compare the output of Get-Member without .ToString():

PS> (Get-Item $HOME).Parent.CreationTime.ToString() | Get-Member

PS> (Get-Item $HOME).Parent.CreationTime | Get-Member

This recipe is only here to show you that PowerShell outputs objects, and what an object looks like. We will look at leveraging the TypeName much later, when we modify the returned objects.

For now, we will stick to properties as the first step for understanding the object model of PowerShell. To demonstrate that methods are also available for use, we will use one that's among the simplest of them, the ToString() method; it's simple because it does not need any arguments—only empty parentheses.

The Get-Member cmdlet is very important in PowerShell because it lets you peek into the object that a certain cmdlet returned. It shows the type of the object returned (TypeName), and shows the properties and methods available. The properties and methods are of different data types themselves, which can be seen in the Definition column. As you get comfortable with objects, you will start to leverage these data types to simplify your tasks.

Just because you can (and not because this is the way to do so), create a subdirectory within your home directory using the CreateSubdirectory() method from the object returned by Get-Item:

PS> (Get-Item $HOME).CreateSubdirectory('test-directory')

This should show you the new directory that you just created:

PS> Get-ChildItem $HOME # To list the contents of your home directory

• The Selecting columns from the output recipe from Chapter 4, Passing Data Through the Pipeline