The Pipeline Part 1

In this lecture we’ll explore the pipeline, introduce some new commands and demonstrate how we can use the pipeline to complete everyday tasks. We’ll also take a look at something new called parameter binding.

We’ll talk about:

• What-if – With what-if, you can test your command before you try it.
• Send output to a file using out-file. get-help out- Using out-file
• Finally, we’ll talk about how PowerShell sends commands through the pipeline.

Let’s say we want to delete some files, but because we’re using wildcards, we don’t want to delete the wrong files. We can take the cautious approach and use the -whatif command.

Let’s open explorer, go to our C drive

I have created a folder named **Company **with a subfolder named HR. I have created several txt files within each folder.

• The goal is to delete all the files in HR and Company without deleting any of the other files or folders on my c drive.

First, I’ll type the command then explain it

• Type Get-ChildItem C:\Company\\*.txt -Recurse | Remove-Item -WhatIf

Get-childitem – Is like using dir command

**I created two folders C:\Company and C:\Company\HR **

*.txt – The files to look for

-Recurse – tells PowerShell to Search Subdirectories, here’s our pipe operator.

Remove-item – Equivalent to delete

-whatif – Test but won’t complete our command. Press Return.

Here we see whatif performing a test operation on these targets.

Now let’s type the same command but this time we’ll use the -confirm parameter

• Get-ChildItem C:\Company\\*.txt -Recurse | Remove-Item -confirm

PowerShell will ask you to confirm the deletion of each text file.

Or we could go ahead and say Yes to all, and it will delete all the files. And we see that all our text files are gone.

Now let’s check out the out-file command.

• **We’re going to write the contents of our application lo…