Prof. Powershell

Process Possibilities

The PowerShell team is sneaky. They've given you some extra properties in objects that you can use to your advantage.

• By Jeffery Hicks
• 09/07/2010

I bet that one of the first cmdlets you learned in Windows PowerShell was Get-Process. You probably even created filters of processes and properties like this:

PS C:\> get-process | where {$_.handles -gt 1000} | sort handles -Descending | Select Name,ID,WorkingSet,Handles

If so, that is great. But did you know that the PowerShell team tucked in some other ways for you to look at processes? First, the process object has a few “extra” properties added by the PowerShell team which you can see when you pipe Get-Process to Get-Member. Try this from your PowerShell session:

PS C:\> get-process | select psconfiguration

PSConfiguration is a property set, or a pre-defined collection of object properties. Theoretically this should make it easier for an administrator to get useful information. You can take this property set even further with a command like this:

PS C:\> get-process | select psconfiguration | sort PriorityClass | format-table -GroupBy PriorityClass -Property Name,ID,FileVersion

Another defined PropertySet is PSResources.

PS C:\> get-process | select PSResources

You're still getting an object which you can sort, filter, export or convert. But you don't have to figure out what property names to use or type them.

Another way you can get a different take on processes is with a formatting cmdlet. The default is Format-Table which is what you get when you just run Get-Process. By try this:

PS C:\> get-process | format-list

A little different isn't it? Because formatting is at the end you can't do anything else other than outputting to a file or printer. If you want to manipulate the objects, you'll need to do it before formatting.

PS C:\> get-process | sort CPU -descending | select -first 5 | format-list

PowerShell also has a little recognized feature called a View. Some object types have different “views” depending on the formatting cmdlet. These are defined in the DotNetTypes.format.ps1xml configuration file and are unfortunately not easy to discover. But I'll point out the process related ones here. First, try this on for size:

PS C:\> get-process | format-table -view Priority

or this:

PS C:\> get-process | format-table -view starttime

I hope you'll keep poking around PowerShell because you never know what you might find.

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