As the final judging of the Scripting Games takes place today I thought it time to blog about a few things I noticed while judging. These comments are not about solving the events but about using PowerShell. These comments are in no particular order – just things I observed.
This is a standard pipeline. I would suggest that you try these snippets to see what is happening.
Get-Process | select -First 3 | Format-Table
There are a number of ways to get this information in to a file
Get-Process | select -First 3 | Export-Csv test1.csv –NoTypeInformation
This stores the whole objects worth of data. Using –NoTypeInformation means that it is returned as a PSCustomObject when we import it.
Alternatively we can do this
Get-Process | select -First 3 | Out-File test1.txt
This stores just what we would have seen on screen – ie the results of the default display
PS> get-content test1.txt
Handles NPM(K) PM(K) WS(K) VM(M) CPU(s) Id ProcessName
——- —— —– —– —– —— — ———–
57 3 1764 5196 58 1.64 808 conhost
30 2 504 2124 20 1404 conhost
57 3 1760 5156 54 0.20 1688 conhost
When we read the file contents we get a collection of strings. All object information is lost.
Get-Process | select -First 3 | Format-Table | Out-File test2.txt
is equivalent to our out-file example above in that we get strings
Get-Process | select -First 3 | Format-Table | export-csv test2.csv
Outputs the formatting objects NOT the data. Oops.
When exporting data to files make sure you are getting what you expect. Don’t export after a format statement. Use Export-Csv if you want objects and Out-File if you just want the data points.