Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripting - Third Edition

The netstat command

The netstat command produces tab-delimited, fixed-width tables. The following example converts the active connections that list active TCP connections, as well as listening TCP and UDP ports, into an object.

A snippet of the output that the example is intended to parse is shown in the following code:

PS> netstat -anoActive Connections  Proto  Local Address   Foreign Address    State        PID  TCP    0.0.0.0:135     0.0.0.0:0          LISTENING    124  TCP    0.0.0.0:445     0.0.0.0:0          LISTENING    4  TCP    0.0.0.0:5357    0.0.0.0:0          LISTENING    4 

When handling text such as this, a pattern based on white space (or not white space) can be used:

^\s*\S+\s+\S+ 

For each column, the following expression with a named group is created:

(?<ColumnName>\S+)\s+ 

The trailing \s+