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With formatting tables out of the way,

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let's spend a few minutes looking at another popular format style,

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lists.

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Okay, as usual,

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let's spend a moment checking out the help by running help Format‑List.

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So this will format the output as a list of properties in

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which each property appears on a new line.

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Seems straightforward enough, right?

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Just like writing a shopping list.

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Do people still even write those?

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Anyway, here in the syntax block,

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there's a few similar parameters between Format‑List and Format‑Table.

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And, of course, there's an alias for Format‑List.

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So if I run Get‑Alias ‑Definition format‑list, we'll see the alias is simply fl.

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All right, let's just run Get‑Process here.

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And in case you didn't watch the previous clip,

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by default, this outputs as a table.

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I'm just going to rerun that and pipe it to the more command because I

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want to take a quick look at these table headers here.

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Take special note here to some of the names as to how they are

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formatted in the table and also note that we are seeing seven

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different properties in this table view.

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Let's rerun Get‑Process, and this time,

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we'll override the default formatting by piping it to Format‑List.

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As expected, we get a list view of properties for every object.

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Each object is separated by a blank line,

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and each property of the object is displayed on a new line.

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One thing worth noting here is take a look at the names of these properties.

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So they're quite different to what we just saw when we formatted to a table.

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And also, we're only seeing five properties here in the list view.

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Whereas in the table view, we were saying seven.

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By now, you're starting to get exposed to some of the nuances with the

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formatting system and that things that are displayed to us aren't

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always the raw underlying data of the objects.

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Let's try grouping the results here.

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Similar to Format‑Table,

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we need to sort the objects first before grouping them with the format command.

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So I'll run Get‑Process.

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I'll pipe that across to Sort‑Object and sort on the Name property.

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And from there,

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we can send it to Format‑List and then use the GroupBy

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parameter to group the results by the name.

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And we can see that the formatting has taken care

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of grouping the results for us.

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So, for example, at the bottom here,

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there are two objects that match the name WmiPrvSE,

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but only one that matches the name of winlogon.

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For the next couple of examples,

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I'm going to run Get‑Process and just grab the winlogon process.

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So we don't have a lot of data being output to the screen that

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we have to keep scrolling up and down for.

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Let me pipe that to Format‑List with no parameters,

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and we get those five properties that PowerShell decides

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to show us by default for a list view.

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Now I've seen a lot of beginners think that if you

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pipe a command to Format‑List,

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that you will get shown all of the properties of that object.

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That is, in fact,

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incorrect because the formatting system could be choosing to

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display just a number of properties back to you,

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which is exactly what's happening here.

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To understand what properties are on this object,

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you could pipe it to Get‑Member, which is absolutely fine,

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and in most cases, it's recommended.

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But sometimes you might want to see the properties

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with the actual values as well.

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On occasion,

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seeing the values right in front of you can actually make it

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easier to determine what you're working with.

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So a little trick we can use is to pipe it to Format‑List,

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but then use the Property parameter and then use the wild card or

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asterisk to tell PowerShell we want to see all properties.

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In fact, because the Property parameter is positional,

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you don't even need to specify it.

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You could just have Format‑List * or fl *.

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And as you can see,

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there are many more properties than the five we were

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being shown just a moment ago.

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If I press the up arrow,

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we can choose what properties we want the Format‑List command to output for us.

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And because the Property parameter is positional,

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wow, say that three times fast,

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we can just put the property names without specifying the parameter,

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and we'll get just those two returned in the output.

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There is something you can do in PowerShell called custom properties.

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And look, I don't want to bog you down with the details too much,

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but I want to show you that you can make use of a custom

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property in the format commands to modify the output that

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you're seeing. For example,

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the property name that we're looking at here for

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the process name is simply Name.

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What if we wanted to modify that to say Process Name instead? I'll up arrow

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that to get the command back and then remove Name and replace it with an @

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symbol and two curly brackets to define a custom expression. Inside of that,

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I can type Name equals Process Name.

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And because I'm using a space, I've put Process Name in double quotes there.

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I then need to use a semicolon and then use the keyword Expression,

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which is where I need to define what the value is going to be.

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I'll put an equals sign and another set of

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brackets. And inside of those brackets,

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I'm going to use $_, which is a way of telling PowerShell that I

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want the current object coming down the pipeline. And then I'm going

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to specify .name to tell PowerShell that I want the value of this

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custom expression to be the name property of the current process

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coming down the pipeline.

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If I run that, notice the value is the same as before,

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but the name of the result is now Process Name

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instead of just Name as it was before.

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This is something you can do with any of the format commands.

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The last thing I want to show here, and again this actually

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applies to all of the format commands, is that so far I've been

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piping commands to a format command, which then outputs it to screen.

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You can use the InputObject parameter of a format command to

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specify the objects that you want to be formatted.

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So let's define a variable of $processes. And in

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that, we'll just store Get‑Process.

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Now remember that variable contains the unformatted object data of processes.

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Nothing more, nothing less.

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I could now run Format‑List and use the InputObject parameter and

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specify the $processes variable, and PowerShell will take those

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objects and format them as a list.

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Functionally,

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it's the same as piping it across to Format‑List, but I did want you to be aware of that capability.