For Loops

In this lecture, we are going to discuss PowerShell For Loops.

The first thing I am going to do is open the PowerShell ISE as an Administrator.

Let’s just define what a PowerShell Loop is. A For Loop allows you to repeat a section of code a specific number of times.

So, you are going to pass a command inside of this For Loop and is going to be repeated a specified number of times like 25 or you can specify 1,000 times or more if you wanted to.

So, the basic format or a For Loop is the following:

for () {

}

Inside of the Brackets we have the command we want to repeat.

Now, we need to specify the 3 elements that define this For Loop.

1. Define the variable we want to use to count and its value
2. What kind of condition we will use when we're counting
3. Either increase or decrease the variable

If we write these in PowerShell syntax is going to look like this.

for ($i=0;$i -lt 5; $i++) {

echo “Im in a loop”

}

And If I execute the code in PowerShell ISE it is going to look like the following:

I get the “Im in a loop” five times.

Now, I can utilize the variable $i inside of the loop. Type the following and execute:

for ($i=0;$i -lt 5; $i++) {

echo “Im in a loop: $i”

}

As you can see, we have the index output that is used as its counting. It starts at 0 and is counting all the way to 4 because 4 is the last number that is less than 5, the last integer number. So we actually get 5 elements but because we are counting from 0 we only count up to 4 for a total of 5 individual e…