CODEWITHSUNDEEP
powershell
jssteele89
jssteele89

Reputation: 555

Get multiple fields back?

Is it possible to get multiple properties back for a command within parentheses? Consider the following code.

$service = (get-service -name 'wuauserv')
$service.Name # I get the name property back

But what If I wanted to get more than one property. For example below:

$service.Name,Status

Why doesn't this work? Is there a way to do it?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 169

Answers (2)

user847990
user847990

Reputation:

What you are dealing with is the concept of how PowerShell handles outputting information and the pipeline. When you collect Get-Service into the variable $service, you are storing an object that has multiple properties.

To work with the properties of a given object (one or many) you utilize Select-Object (docs). Whether you are dealing with that variable contents or directly with the output from Get-Service you have to pipe the output to Select-Object to retrieve one to many properties. You can do this multiple ways. PowerShell works on positions when it comes to parameters, so the position 0 parameter for Select-Object is -Property. All of the following are equivalent, and just various ways to get the same result:

$proc = Get-Service -Name mssql*
$proc | Select-Object Name, DisplayName

$proc = Get-Service -Name mssql*
Select-Object -Property Name, DisplayName -InputObject $proc

Get-Service -Name mssql* | Select-Object Name, DisplayName

If you want your variable to only contain a given set of properties then you would also utilize Select-Object:

$proc = Get-Service -Name mssql* | Select-Object Name, DisplayName
$proc

Output Example: enter image description here

Upvotes: 1

Drew
Drew

Reputation: 4030

When you do $Service.Name it returns a the expanded property, how would you return the expanded property for multiple properties?

PS H:\> $Service = (Get-Service -name 'wuauserv')
PS H:\> $Service | Select-Object Name, Status

Name      Status
----      ------
wuauserv Stopped

Notice how they are not an expanded property.

PS H:\> $service.Name
wuauserv
PS H:\> $service | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Name
wuauserv

Trying to expand multiple properties will end up with an error as the method cannot accept multiple arguments (Name, Status).

Upvotes: 0

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