Use formatting and filtering

  • 1 minute

When you work with PowerShell, filtering and formatting are important concepts to understand, for a couple of reasons. First, you want to create a pipeline that produces the result you want. Second, you want to do so efficiently. Both in terms of how you pull data over the network, and how you ensure that the result is something you can work with.

Filtering left

In a pipeline statement, filtering left means filtering for the results you want as early as possible. You can think of the term left as early, because PowerShell statements run from left to right. The idea is to make the statement fast and efficient by ensuring that the dataset you operate on is as small as possible. This principle really comes into play when your commands are operating on larger data stores or you're bringing back results across the network.

Consider the following statement:

Get-Process | Select-Object Name | Where-Object Name -eq 'name-of-process'

This statement first retrieves all of the processes on the machine. It ends up formatting the response so that only the Name property is listed. This statement doesn't follow the filtering left principle, because it operates on all the processes, attempts to format the response, and then filters at the end.

It's better to filter first and then format, as in the following statement.

Get-Process | Where-Object Name -eq 'name-of-process' | Select-Object Name

Often, a cmdlet that offers filtering is more efficient than using Where-Object. Here's a more efficient version of the preceding statement:

Get-Process -Name 'name-of-process' | Select-Object Name

In this version, the parameter -Name does the filtering for you.

Formatting right, formatting as the last thing you do

Whereas filtering left means to filter something as early as possible in a statement, formatting right means to format something as late as possible in the statement. Ok, but why do I need to format late? The answer is because format commands alter the structure of the object that your results are contained in so that your data is no longer found in the same properties. This alteration impacts your ability to retrieve the information you want by using pipe commands, Select-Object, or by looping through the results with foreach.

The formatting destroys the object with which you're dealing. Take the following call for example:

Get-Process 'some process' | Select-Object Name, CPU | Get-Member

The type you get back is System.Diagnostics.Process. Now, add the Format-Table formatter like so:

Get-Process 'some process' | Format-Table Name,CPU | Get-Member

Focusing just on the types you get back, notice you're getting back something different:

TypeName: Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.Internal.Format.FormatStartData
TypeName: Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.Internal.Format.GroupStartData
TypeName: Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.Internal.Format.FormatEntryData
TypeName: Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.Internal.Format.GroupEndData

What these types are, isn't important for this lesson. What's important to realize is that when you use any type of formatting command, your data is different. And when it's different, it may no longer contain the columns you care about. Let's illustrate with an example:

Get-Process 'some process' | Select-Object Name, Cpu

The preceding command gives you a result with the columns Name and CPU.

Name       CPU
----       ---
zsh  1.2984395
zsh  0.2522047
zsh  0.2486375
zsh  0.2683466
zsh  0.2681874
zsh  1.6799438
zsh  0.2909816
zsh  0.7855272

Let's use formatting first and then Select-Object, to illustrate what might happen if you don't format last:

Get-Process 'some process' | Format-Table Name,CPU | Select-Object Name, CPU

The result now looks like so:

Name CPU
---- ---

It's empty, because Format-Table transformed the object containing your results by placing data into other properties. Your data isn't gone, only your properties. The preceding PowerShell command makes an attempt to find the properties but is unable to.

Formatting commands should be the last thing you use in your statement because they're meant for formatting things nicely for screen presentation. They aren't meant to be used as a way to filter or sort your data.

Formatting commands

The most common cmdlets to use to format your output are Format-Table and Format-List. By default, most cmdlets format output as a table. If you don't want your output to display properties in columns, use the Format-List cmdlet to reformat them as a list.