At this point, you’ve learned to be pretty effective with PowerShell’s pipeline. Running commands (e.g., Get-Process | Sort-Object VM -desc | ConvertTo-Html | Out-File procs.html) is powerful, accomplishing in one line what used to take several lines of script. But you can do even better. In this chapter, we dig deeper into the pipeline and uncover some of its most powerful capabilities, which allow you to pass data between commands the right way with less work.
One of the reasons we like PowerShell so much is that it enables us to be more effective administrators without having to write complex scripts, as we used to have to do in Bash. The key to powerful one-line commands lies in the way the PowerShell pipeline works.
Let us be clear: you could skip this chapter and still be effective with PowerShell, but in most cases you’d have to resort to Bash-style scripts and programs. Although PowerShell’s pipeline capabilities can be complicated, they’re probably easier to learn than more-complicated programming skills. By learning to manipulate the pipeline, you can be much more effective without needing to write scripts.