PowerShell in Depth, Second Edition

Chapter 9. Formatting

This chapter covers

• PowerShell’s formatting system
• PowerShell’s Format cmdlets
• Creating custom formats
• Formatting tips

PowerShell, as you’ve learned in the preceding chapters, works primarily with objects. Objects are just an in-memory data structure. But the time comes when PowerShell needs to share information from those objects with us humans. PowerShell has to take those in-memory data structures and convert them into something a person can view. PowerShell’s formatting system is designed to accomplish that task.

9.1. The time to format

Whenever you construct a command line, those commands all run in a pipeline. What you don’t see is an invisible cmdlet hanging out at the end of every pipeline: Out-Default ...