PowerShell: Automating Administrative Tasks

Chapter 9. File I/O

So far, all the input to commands has been in the form of parameters, and the output has been either to the console (with write-host), or to the output stream. In this chapter, we will look at some of the ways that PowerShell gives us to work with files. The topics that will be covered include the following:

• Reading and writing text files
• Working with CSV files
• Output redirection
• Reading and writing objects using CLIXML

Reading and writing text files

One method of reading a text file in PowerShell is to use the Get-Content cmdlet. Get-Content outputs the contents of the file as a collection of strings. If we have a text file called Servers.txt that contains the names of the SQL Servers in our environment, we would use the following ...