- Windows Server 2012 Automation with PowerShell Cookbook
- Ed Goad
- 544字
- 2025-02-24 16:00:14
Sorting and filtering
One of the great features of PowerShell is its ability to sort and filter objects. This filtering can be used to limit a larger result set and reporting only the information necessary.
This section will review several methods of filtering and sorting data.
How to do it...
- To explore the filtering capabilities of PowerShell, we look at the running processes on our computer. We then use the
Where
clause to filter the results.Get-Process | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq "chrome"} Get-Process | Where-Object Name -eq "chrome" Get-Process | Where-Object Name -like "*hrom*" Get-Process | Where-Object Name -ne "chrome" Get-Process | Where-Object Handles -gt 1000
- To view sorting in PowerShell, we again view the processes on our computer and use
Sort-Object
to change the default sort order.Get-Process | Sort-Object Handles Get-Process | Sort-Object Handles -Descending Get-Process | Sort-Object Handles, ID –Descending
- To explore the select features of PowerShell, we use
Select-String
andSelect-Object
clause:Select-String -Path C:\Windows\WindowsUpdate.log -Pattern "Installing updates" Get-Process | Select-Object Name -Unique
- To view the grouping capabilities of PowerShell, we use
Format-Table
with the–GroupBy
command:Get-Process | Format-Table -GroupBy ProcessName
How it works...
In the first section, we review various methods of filtering information using the Where
clause:
- The first method uses the PowerShell
Where-Object
clause format. The$_
identifier represents the object being passed through the pipe, so$_.Name
refers to theName
property of the object. The–eq
is an equals parameter that instructsWhere-Object
to compare the two values. - The second method performs the same task as the first but uses a parameter format that is new in PowerShell 3.0. In this method the
Where-Object
comparison no longer needs to use$_
to reference the object being passed, and we no longer need the curly braces{}
. - The last three methods perform similar comparisons using different parameter. The
–like
parameter allows for the use of the wildcard character*
allowing for less exact filtering. The–ne
parameter means not equal and is the exact opposite of the equals parameter. And the–gt
parameter means greater than and compares the attribute value to a known value.
The second section uses the Sort-Object
command to sort and organize the object attributes. In this section, we show sorting by the handles
attribute in both ascending (the default method), and descending format. Additionally, we see that multiple attributes can be sorted at the same time.
The third section uses the Select-String
and Select-Object
commands to restrict what is returned. The first method searches the WindowsUpdate.log
for the string Installing updates
and returns the results. The second method takes the output of Get-Process
and filters it to only return a unique list of named processes.
The fourth section shows how to perform grouping based on an attribute. The Format-Table
command includes a property named –GroupBy
that, instead of returning a single table, will return multiple tables. In this case, for each unique ProcessName
, a separate table is returned.