The pipeline - using output from a PowerShell cmdlet

One of the first questions people have when they begin to use PowerShell for scripting is how to manipulate the output from a cmdlet to perform another action.

The pipeline symbol | is used at the end of a cmdlet to take the data it exports and feed it to the next cmdlet. A simple example is using Select-Object to only show the Name property of a file shown from Get-ChildItem:

Get-ChildItem | Select-Object Name
#This may be shortened to:
gci | Select Name

More advanced usage of the pipeline allows us to pipe the output of a cmdlet into a foreach loop:

Get-ChildItem | ForEach-Object {
    Copy-Item -Path $_.FullName -destination C:\NewDirectory\ 
}

#This may be shortened to:
gci | % { Copy $_.FullName C:\NewDirectory\ }

Note that the example above uses the $_ automatic variable. $_ is the short alias of $PSItem which is an automatic variable which contains the current item in the pipeline.