Of course any alteration of the piped data is harmful, then. Contrasting that to the Unix pipeline model exhibits a major flaw: No one there knows what is being passed or what is expected. What’s more, PowerShell knows what it’s passing, what the consuming cmdlet expects and what conversions can be applied to that. The one exception probably being tar and compression tools (but most tar versions handle that directly already). Really, most of the time it goes straight to a file instead. I rarely pipe binary data from program to program. To respond to one frequent criticism here: One might actually call converting text into various formats for input to other tools an advantage, but I feel that being misplaced. But when using a shell, magic can be awfully convenient. I like to know exactly what’s going on, especially when debugging. This sort of magic makes me nervous when I’m programming. PowerShell does a lot of work behind the scenes to implicitly convert output types to input types when possible. This is where more PowerShell magic comes in. For example, maybe one command outputs a COM object and another takes in a. Not all problems go away just because commands pass around objects. The grubby, error-prone text munging between commands goes away. Commands pass around objects, not strings. If the output is piped to another command, the latter command receives a.

But the string representation of an object is not the object.

The command may display a string on the command line, but that string is just a human-readable representation. NET object representing a date, not a text string. For example, if the output of a PowerShell command is a date, then the command returns a. The PowerShell pipeline is different because PowerShell commands spit out objects. Maybe at a high level you care about programs A, B, and C, but in between are calls to utilities like grep, sed, or awk to bridge the gaps between output formats and input formats. The key point is the Unix commands spit out text. Strip these characters from these columns, replace this pattern with this other pattern, etc. There’s some manipulation going on to prepare the output of A as the input of B.

This is actually implemented asīecause B doesn’t really take the output of A. Meaning the output of A goes to B, and the output of B goes to C. But in practice, things don’t go quite so smoothly. The output of one program can be the input to another. Unix has thousands of little utilities that can be strung together via a pipeline. One of the great strengths of Unix is the shell pipeline. Please share your examples in the comments. I intended to come up with a great example, but I’ve decided to go ahead and publish it and let you come up with your own examples. This is a blog post I’ve intended to write for some time now.

Powershell grep sed