14 Multitasking with background jobs

Everyone’s always telling you to multitask, right? Why shouldn’t PowerShell help you with that by doing more than one thing at a time? It turns out that PowerShell can do exactly that, particularly for longer-running tasks that might involve multiple target computers. Make sure you’ve read chapter 13 before you dive into this chapter, because we’ll be taking those remoting concepts a step further.

14.1 Making PowerShell do multiple things at the same time

You should think of PowerShell as a single-threaded application, meaning that it can do only one thing at a time. You type a command, you press Enter, and the shell waits for that command to execute. You can’t run a second command until the first command finishes.

But with its background jobs functionality, PowerShell has the ability to move a command onto a separate background thread or a separate background PowerShell process. That enables the command to run in the background as you continue to use the shell for another task. You have to make that decision before running the command; after you press Enter, you can’t decide to move a long-running command into the background.

After commands are in the background, PowerShell provides mechanisms to check on their status, retrieve any results, and so forth.

14.2 Synchronous vs. asynchronous

14.3 Creating a process job

14.4 Creating a thread job

14.5 Remoting, as a job

14.6 Jobs in the wild

14.7 Getting job results

14.8 Working with child jobs

14.9 Commands for managing jobs

14.10 Common points of confusion

14.11 Lab