Windows PowerShell Cookbook

Chapter 10. Code Reuse

10.0. Introduction

What surprises many people is how much you can accomplish in PowerShell from the interactive prompt alone. Since PowerShell makes it so easy to join its powerful commands together into even more powerful combinations, enthusiasts grow to relish this brevity. In fact, there is a special place in the heart of most scripting enthusiasts set aside entirely for the most compact expressions of power: one-liners.

Despite its interactive efficiency, you obviously don’t want to retype all your brilliant ideas anew each time you need them. When you want to save or reuse the commands that you’ve written, PowerShell provides many avenues to support you: scripts, libraries, functions, script blocks, and more.

10.1. Write a Script

Problem

You want to store your commands in a script, so that you can share them or reuse them later.

Solution

To write a PowerShell script, create a plain-text file with your editor of choice. Add your PowerShell commands to that script (the same PowerShell commands you use from the interactive shell) and then save it with a .ps1 extension.

Discussion

One of the most important things to remember about PowerShell is that running scripts and working at the command line are essentially equivalent operations. If you see it in a script, you can type it or paste it at the command line. If you typed it on the command line, you can paste it into a text file and call it a script.

Once you write your script, PowerShell lets you call it in the same ...