Book Image

Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripting (Second Edition) - Second Edition

By : Brenton J.W. Blawat
Book Image

Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripting (Second Edition) - Second Edition

By: Brenton J.W. Blawat

Overview of this book

PowerShell scripts offer a handy way to automate various chores. Working with these scripts effectively can be a difficult task. This comprehensive guide starts from scratch and covers advanced-level topics to make you a PowerShell expert. The first module, PowerShell Fundamentals, begins with new features, installing PowerShell on Linux, working with parameters and objects, and also how you can work with .NET classes from within PowerShell. In the next module, you’ll see how to efficiently manage large amounts of data and interact with other services using PowerShell. You’ll be able to make the most of PowerShell’s powerful automation feature, where you will have different methods to parse and manipulate data, regular expressions, and WMI. After automation, you will enter the Extending PowerShell module, which covers topics such as asynchronous processing and, creating modules. The final step is to secure your PowerShell, so you will land in the last module, Securing and Debugging PowerShell, which covers PowerShell execution policies, error handling techniques, and testing. By the end of the book, you will be an expert in using the PowerShell language.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Pipelines


The pipeline is one of the most prominent features of PowerShell. The pipeline is used to send output from one command (standard out or StdOut) into another command (standard in or StdIn).

Standard output

The term standard output is used because there are different kinds of output. Each of these different forms of output is referred to as a stream.

When assigning the output of a command to a variable, the values are taken from the standard output (the output stream) of a command. For example, the following command assigns the data from the standard output to a variable:

$stdout = Get-CimInstance Win32_ComputerSystem

Non-standard output

In PowerShell there are other output streams; these include error (Write-Error), information (Write-Information, introduced in PowerShell 5), warning (Write-Warning), and Verbose (Write-Verbose). PowerShell also has Write-Host, which displays information to the PowerShell host (the console, or PowerShell ISE). Each of these has a stream of its own.

For...