Prof. Powershell

On File

Saving results of commands or queries to a file is easy with this PowerShell cmdlet.

• By Jeffery Hicks
• 04/30/2008

PS C:\> get-process > processes.txt

There's nothing wrong with this technique in PowerShell. I have yet to find a situation where it doesn't work.

But PowerShell has a cmdlet called Out-File which offers a bit more flexibility. This cmdlet should be at the end of your pipelined expression:

PS C:\> get-process | where {$_.workingset -gt 10mb} | out-file LargeProc.txt

Used without any parameters, Out-File will overwrite any existing file with the same name. The cmdlet includes an -append parameter which will give you the same result as if you had used the >> redirection operators.

However, the cmdlet also has a nice feature to keep you from accidentally overwriting a file. You can use the -NoClobber parameter:

PS C:\> get-process | where {$_.workingset -gt 10mb} | out-file LargeProc.txt -noclobber

When you use this parameter, if the file already exists PowerShell will display an error message:

Out-File : File C:\LargeProc.txt already exists and NoClobber was specified.

The cmdlet also supports the -whatIf and -Confirm parameters. These are also great "sanity-checkers."

By the way, you don't have to rely on the pipeline to use Out-File. You can use its -InputObject parameter which will take the specified object and send it to a file:

PS C:\> $p = get-process
PS C:\> out-file myprocs.txt -input $p

Finally, depending on your situation or the expression, Out-File supports several encoding schemes. Use the -Encoding parameter. The default is Unicode, but you can choose from ASCII, OEM, Default, BigEndianUnicode, UTF7, UTF8, and UTF32.