Prof. Powershell

How Do You Measure Up?

Measure-Object cmdlet has some interesting properties, but it's up to us to figure out how to use them creatively.

• By Jeffery Hicks
• 12/13/2010

If you've been reading Prof. PowerShell for a while, I'm sure you've seen a few examples of Measure-Object in action. This cmdlet can do a number of calculations:

PS C:\> dir c:\work | Measure-Object -Property Length -Sum -Average

Count    : 33
Average  : 2616247.3030303
Sum      : 86336161
Maximum  :
Minimum  :
Property : Length

In my Work folder, Measure-Object used the Length property of all the file objects and I can see that I have 33 files as well as the average and total sizes in bytes. But Measure-Object can also give you stats on the contents of a file.

This will only work with text files, but if you have any type of log file you might want to know how many words or lines it contains.

PS C:\> get-content c:\work\r.txt | measure-object -Word -Line -Character | format-list

Lines      : 7
Words      : 55
Characters : 833
Property   :

I used Get-Content to retrieve the contents of a text file, c:\work\r.txt, and piped it Measure-Object. Instead of using the numeric properties like -Sum, I use the text-oriented ones like -Line and -Word. The results are self-explanatory.

Unfortunately, the cmdlet insists on writing the “Property” which is sort of silly because it is irrelevant in this context. A cleaner, albeit longer, approach is to pipe to Select-Object.

PS C:\> get-content c:\work\r.txt | measure-object -Word -Line -Character | Select Words,Lines,Characters

Words     Lines     Character
-----     -----     ---------
   55         7            83

One interesting behavior when using this with multiple files is that you can end up with total for all files. I have several text files in my Work directory. When I get the content for all those files, Measure-Object returns a value that represents the sum:

PS C:\work> (dir *.txt | get-content | measure-object -word).words 952

Thus, the total number of words in all my text files is 952. If you want individual counts, you'll need to use ForEach-Object:

PS C:\work> dir *.txt | foreach {$_.name; (get-content $_ | measure-object -word).words}
asset-demo.txt
24
computers.txt
5
eventlog-demo.txt
184
file-disk-demo.txt
190
LocalAdmin-demo.txt
105
pipelinedemo.txt
91
r.txt
55
service-demo.txt
208
stats.txt
90

If you come up with a killer use for this concept, I'd love to hear about it.

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