PowerShell, unlike some other scripting languages, sends objects through the pipeline. What this means is that when you send data from one command to another, it’s essential to be able to create, modify, and collect objects.

Creating an object is simple. Most objects you create will be custom objects in PowerShell, and the type to use for that is PSObject. PowerShell will also allow you to create any object you could create in .NET.

Here’s an example of creating a new objects with a few properties:

Option 1: New-Object

$newObject = New-Object -TypeName PSObject -Property @{
    Name = $env:username
    ID = 12
    Address = $null
}

# Returns
PS> $newObject
Name ID Address
---- -- -------
nem  12

You can store the object in a variable by prefacing the command with $newObject =

You may also need to store collections of objects. This can be done by creating an empty collection variable, and adding objects to the collection, like so:

$newCollection = @()
$newCollection += New-Object -TypeName PSObject -Property @{
    Name = $env:username
    ID = 12
    Address = $null
}

You may then wish to iterate through this collection object by object. To do that, locate the Loop section in the documentation.

Option 2: Select-Object

A less common way of creating objects that you’ll still find on the internet is the following:

$newObject = 'unuseddummy' | Select-Object -Property Name, ID, Address
$newObject.Name = $env:username
$newObject.ID = 12

# Returns
PS> $newObject
Name ID Address
---- -- -------
nem  12

Option 3: pscustomobject type accelerator (PSv3+ required)

The ordered type accelerator forces PowerShell to keep our properties in the order that we defined them. You don’t need the ordered type accelerator to use [PSCustomObject]:

$newObject = [PSCustomObject][Ordered]@{
    Name = $env:Username
    ID = 12
    Address = $null
}

# Returns
PS> $newObject
Name ID Address
---- -- -------
nem  12