Learn PowerShell in a Month of Lunches, Fourth Edition

6 The pipeline: Connecting commands

In chapter 4, you learned that running commands in PowerShell is the same as running commands in any other shell: you type a cmdlet name, give it parameters, and press Enter. What makes PowerShell special isn’t the way it runs commands but the way it allows multiple commands to be connected to each other in powerful, one-line sequences.

6.1 Connecting one command to another: Less work for you

PowerShell connects commands to each other by using a pipeline. The pipeline provides a way for one command to pass, or pipe, its output to another command, allowing that second command to have something to work with. This can be seen with the vertical bar | between two cmdlets (figure 6.1).

Figure 6.1 Showing the pipe ...