Ok, maybe I’m not Lady Macbeth dealing with a guilty conscience but there are times I have to get things out of my system, like information via PowerShell. Often I want to store the results of a cmdlet in a variable for additional processing. Usually I do something like this:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
$myProcesses<\/span>=<\/span>get<\/span>-<\/span>process<\/span><\/div><\/pre>\n<\/div>\nAn alternative is to use one of the common paramaters, -OutVariable. With this parameter I can achieve the same result with this expression:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\nget<\/span>-<\/span>process <\/span>-<\/span>outvariable myProcesses<\/span><\/div><\/pre>\n<\/div>\nI can then access $myProcesses just as I normally would. You only need to specify the variable name (myProcesses, not the variable $myProcesses). If you don’t want to see the cmdlet output because you’re going to manipulate the result simply pipe the output to null.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\nget<\/span>-<\/span>process <\/span>-<\/span>outvariable myProcesses <\/span>|<\/span> <\/span>out<\/span>-<\/span>null<\/span><\/div><\/pre>\n<\/div>\nFundamentally there’s not much difference, unless you want to streamline code like this:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\nget<\/span>-<\/span>process <\/span>-<\/span>outvariable myProcesses <\/span>|<\/span> <\/span>out<\/span>-<\/span>null<\/span> ;write<\/span>-<\/span>host $myProcesses.count processes<\/span><\/div><\/pre>\n<\/div>\nThis will display a message like: 65 processes<\/p>\n
One thing to be careful of is where you use -OutVariable. Try this code and look at $result.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\nget<\/span>-<\/span>process <\/span>-<\/span>outvariable result <\/span>|<\/span> Where {$_.name <\/span>-<\/span>eq <\/span>\"<\/span>svchost<\/span>\"<\/span>}<\/span><\/div><\/pre>\n<\/div>\nOn the console you’ll see something like this:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\nHandles NPM<\/span>(<\/span>K<\/span>)<\/span> PM<\/span>(<\/span>K<\/span>)<\/span> WS<\/span>(<\/span>K<\/span>)<\/span> VM<\/span>(<\/span>M<\/span>)<\/span> CPU<\/span>(<\/span>s<\/span>)<\/span> Id ProcessName
------- ------ ----- ----- ----- ------ -- -----------
<\/span>137<\/span> <\/span>3<\/span> <\/span>1496<\/span> <\/span>3396<\/span> <\/span>35<\/span> <\/span>14.72<\/span> <\/span>904<\/span> svchost
<\/span>520<\/span> <\/span>14<\/span> <\/span>2304<\/span> <\/span>4128<\/span> <\/span>38<\/span> <\/span>69.20<\/span> <\/span>980<\/span> svchost
<\/span>1878<\/span> <\/span>52<\/span> <\/span>34152<\/span> <\/span>43756<\/span> <\/span>251<\/span> <\/span>862.52<\/span> <\/span>1116<\/span> svchost
<\/span>106<\/span> <\/span>6<\/span> <\/span>1448<\/span> <\/span>2708<\/span> <\/span>29<\/span> <\/span>92.58<\/span> <\/span>1352<\/span> svchost
<\/span>162<\/span> <\/span>3<\/span> <\/span>3240<\/span> <\/span>4036<\/span> <\/span>38<\/span> <\/span>22.28<\/span> <\/span>1412<\/span> svchost
<\/span>173<\/span> <\/span>5<\/span> <\/span>2104<\/span> <\/span>3404<\/span> <\/span>36<\/span> <\/span>19.10<\/span> <\/span>1428<\/span> svchost
<\/span>106<\/span> <\/span>3<\/span> <\/span>1316<\/span> <\/span>2952<\/span> <\/span>34<\/span> <\/span>54.13<\/span> <\/span>2856<\/span> svchost
<\/span><\/div><\/pre>\n<\/div>\nBut if you look at $result you’ll see it shows every process. Why? The OutVariable parameter is storing output of the Get-Process cmdlet and storing the output in $result. What you really need it to use OutVariable with the Where-object cmdlet like this:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\nget<\/span>-<\/span>process <\/span>|<\/span> Where {$_.name <\/span>-<\/span>eq <\/span>\"<\/span>svchost<\/span>\"<\/span>} <\/span>-<\/span>outvariable result <\/span>|<\/span> <\/span>out<\/span>-<\/span>null<\/span><\/div><\/pre>\n<\/div>\nNow if you look at $result you’ll get the filtered results. Using OutVariable won’t change the world but it might make it help condense your PowerShell expressions.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Technorati tags: PowerShell<\/a>, CommonParameters<\/a>, OutVariable<\/a>, Scripting<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ok, maybe I’m not Lady Macbeth dealing with a guilty conscience but there are times I have to get things out of my system, like information via PowerShell. Often I want to store the results of a cmdlet in a variable for additional processing. Usually I do something like this:$myProcesses=get-processAn alternative is to use one of the common paramaters, -OutVariable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-windows-powershell"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}