CODEWITHSUNDEEP
powershellpipe
WYMB
WYMB

Reputation: 15

Piping the output of powershell to the object id

Having issues with a powershell command, I'm trying to bulk license a group of users but I'm having difficulties getting the output of one command to be the input of another and insight would be greatly appreciated

I first tried 

Get-MsolUser -All -UnlicensedUsersOnly -City "city name" | ForEach {Set-MsolUserLicense -AddLicenses "Account SKU"}

then I tried

Get-MsolUser -All -UnlicensedUsersOnly -City "City Name" | select-object UserprincipalName | ForEach {Set-MsolUserLicense -Userprincipalname <String> -AddLicenses "Account SKU ID"}

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1359

Answers (3)

mklement0
mklement0

Reputation: 437109

Generally, you only need the ForEach-Object cmdlet (whose built-in alias is foreach):

  • for target cmdlets that do not support direct input from the pipeline [with the specific objects provided]

  • for custom processing of each input object with multiple expressions or commands in a script block ({ ... }), inside of which automatic variable $_ represents the input object at hand.

Specifically, in your case you do not need a ForEach-Object call, and while you still can make it work with such a call, as shown in TessellatingHeckler's answer, it is not only needlessly verbose but also significantly slower.

Get-MsolUser outputs objects of type [Microsoft.Online.Administration.User], and Set-MsolUserLicense's -UserPrincipalName parameter is designed to implicitly bind to such objects via their .UserPrincipalName property, so that you can simply pipe Get-MsolUser output directly to Set-MsolUserLicense:

Get-MsolUser -All -UnlicensedUsersOnly -City "city name" |
  Set-MsolUserLicense -AddLicenses "Account SKU ID"

Upvotes: 1

TessellatingHeckler
TessellatingHeckler

Reputation: 28963

Get-MsolUser -All -UnlicensedUsersOnly -City "City Name" |
ForEach {
    Set-MsolUserLicense -Userprincipalname $_.UserPrincipalName -AddLicenses "Account SKU ID"
}

Upvotes: 0

Ivan
Ivan

Reputation: 373

Inside of the foreach you can get access to the current element using

$_

So you can access any property of the current element using the following syntax:

$_.PropertyYouNeed

Upvotes: 0

Related Questions