Take traditional pipeline behavior from shells like Bash and Cmd.exe, mix in PowerShell’s unique object-oriented nature, and add a dash of Linux-style command parsing. The result is PowerShell’s pipeline, a fairly complex and deeply powerful tool for composing tools into administrative solutions. Our goal is to turn you from a scripter into a toolmaker; to do so, you must understand the pipeline at its most basic level and create tools that take full advantage of the pipeline. Although we covered these concepts in Learn PowerShell in a Month of Lunches, Fourth Edition (Manning, 2022), we’ll go deeper in this chapter and focus on the pipeline as something to write for, rather than just use.
Let’s start with a little practice exercise. Grab a sheet of paper (or a tablet you can write on), and draw something similar to what you see in figure 4.1. Now, write some command names in those boxes: maybe Get-Process in the first box, ConvertTo-HTML in the second box, and Out-File in the third box.
