We've talked about the output stream, but it turns out that PowerShell has quite a few streams besides this. Here's the list, including one that was introduced in PowerShell 5:
|
Stream |
Number |
Contents |
|---|---|---|
|
Output |
1 |
Output from commands |
|
Error |
2 |
Error messages |
|
Warning |
3 |
Warning messages |
|
Debug |
4 |
Debug messages |
|
Verbose |
5 |
Verbose output |
|
Information |
6 |
General information (PowerShell 5) |
Similar to DOS, you can redirect streams to a file using the greater-than symbol (>). For example, you can send a directory listing to a file as follows:
Dir c:\temp >c:\temp\files.txt
The output is formatted according to standard PowerShell formatting, but since it's just a text file, you can't recreate the objects that you started with. Also, unlike with Set-Content, you can't control the output encoding, which is always Unicode if you use the redirection operator.