PowerShell Owners Manual

I almost wish I had stumbled on this before. Microsoft has published an “Owners Manual” for PowerShell. You know, that little book in the back of your glove box? Yeah, only this one is uber useful, and while not PowerCLI specific, will make your life as a VI admin, and Windows admin that much nicer.

From the pipelining section:

Piping and the Pipeline

It’s inevitable: no sooner do you get Windows PowerShell installed then you start hearing about and reading about “piping” and “the pipeline.” In turn, that leads to two questions: 1) What’s a pipeline?, and 2) Do I even need to know about piping and pipelines?

Let’s answer the second question first: Do you even need to know about piping and pipelines? Yes, you do. There’s no doubt that you can write Windows PowerShell scripts without using pipelines. The question, however, is whether you’d want to write PowerShell scripts without using pipelines. You can order a banana split and ask them to hold the ice cream; that’s fine, but at that point you don’t really have a banana split, do you? The same is true of the PowerShell pipeline: you can write scripts without a pipeline. But, at that point, do you really have

Well worth a read.