Chapter 2. Working with types

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Most shell environments can only deal with strings, so the ability to use objects makes PowerShell profoundly different. And where you have objects, you also have object types. Much of PowerShell’s power comes from the innovative way it uses types. In this chapter, we’ll look at the PowerShell type system, show how to take advantage of it, and examine some of the things you can accomplish with types in PowerShell. One of the biggest impacts of an object’s type is how it’s displayed.

2.1. Type management in the wild, wild West

2.2. Basic types and literals

2.3. Collections: dictionaries and hashtables

2.4. Collections: arrays and sequences

2.5. Type literals

2.6. Type conversions

2.7. Summary