Prof. Powershell

Fun with PowerShell's Out-GridView

PowerShell 3 stretches out the features of older cmdlets. Out-Gridview is one example, which I show off in this week's tip.

• By Jeffery Hicks
• 01/08/2013

Even though Windows PowerShell is primarily a console-based management engine, there are a few GUI bits you might want to take advantage of. One of them, which we've had since PowerShell 2 is Out-Gridview. As the name implies, this is a cmdlet that you pipe objects "out" to:

PS C:\> get-process | out-gridview

What you get is a graphical display of the default view (see Fig. 1).

Figure 1. Default grid view; in PowerShell 2, it's all you get. (Click image to view larger version.)

You can sort on column headings or do additional filtering. In PowerShell 2 that was about it. However, the version that ships with PowerShell 3 has some nice enhancements you might want to take advantage of.

The first is the ability to pass an object back to the pipeline. I can run a command like this:

PS C:\> dir c:\work\*.ps1 | out-gridview -Title "Work Scripts" -passthru

which gives me Figure 2.

Figure 2. PowerShell 3 takes the gridview a bit farther. (Click image to view larger version.)

Notice I now have OK and Cancel buttons. If I select an item and click OK, the underlying object is passed back to the pipeline:

PS C:\> dir c:\work\*.ps1 | out-gridview -Title "Work Scripts" -passthru

   Directory: C:\work

Mode       LastWriteTime    Length  Name
----       -------------    ------  ----
-a---   3/7/2012 2:32 PM      3152  Add-VMtoInventory.ps1

What this means is that I could run a command like this:

PS C:\> dir c:\work\*.ps1 | out-gridview -Title "Work Scripts" -passthru | foreach { ise $_.fullname}

Now, the script I select will be opened in the PowerShell ISE.

What if you want to pass multiple items back? Easy, just select while holding the Ctrl key:

PS C:\> get-eventlog -list | out-gridview -title "Select one or more event logs"

Figure 3. Select more by holding down Ctrl and the items you require. (Click image to view larger version.)

PS C:\> get-eventlog -list | out-gridview -title "Select one or more event logs" -PassThru

Max(K)  Retain     OverflowAction  Entries  Log
------  ------     --------------  -------  ---
20,480       0  OverwriteAsNeeded   19,661  Application
16,384       0  OverwriteAsNeeded    9,193  System

If you want to only allow a single selection, then use a command like this:

PS C:\> get-eventlog -list | out-gridview -title "Select one or more event logs" -OutputMode Single

The value of "Multiple" is the same thing as using -Passthru. Let's put this all together. Here are the commands:

PS C:\> $logs = get-eventlog -list | select -expand log | out-gridview -Title "Select on or more event logs" -PassThru
PS C:\> $count = 5,15,20,25 | out-gridview -title "How many entries?" -OutputMode Single
PS C:\> $logs | foreach { $log = $_ ; Get-Eventlog $log -Newest $count | select @{Name="Log";Expression={$log}},TimeGenerated,EntryType,Source,EventID,Message } | Out-GridView -Title "Event Log Report"

I'll let you run them to see the results in Out-GridView and to discover for yourself just how much fun you can have with PowerShell 3.

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