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The first Out cmdlet we're going to explore is a pretty popular one,

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which is Out‑File.

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The name of this cmdlet is pretty self‑explanatory,

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but let's check out the help by running help Out‑File.

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The synopsis is straightforward enough.

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It sends output to a file.

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Something of interest here is that it doesn't say what

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type of file you need to specify.

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And that's because Out‑File is dealing with text,

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and it will output to a file with whatever extension you give it.

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But in our demo, we're going to work with a plain old text file.

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Let's keep using the example from the last module of working with Get‑Process.

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And I'm going to just choose processes starting with an s so we

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don't have a lot of data to scroll around with.

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We can simply pipe that across to Out‑File,

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which has a parameter named ‑FilePath,

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which is where you need to tell PowerShell where you

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want the data to be output to.

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I'll store it in C:\Docs\ and call the file process.txt.

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I could show this to you in the console with Get‑Content,

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but I want to open this up in Notepad just so you can visualize what's going on.

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So I'll run notepad C:\Docs\process.txt.

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Let me make that bigger, and there are a couple of things to point out here.

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Firstly, this is just a raw text file.

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These are no longer PowerShell objects.

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I can't import this back in and suddenly have PowerShell

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objects at my disposal to work with.

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Secondly, I didn't specify a format command,

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so PowerShell has used the default formatting for Get‑Process,

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which is to output the results to a table with these specific properties.

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With that said,

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you can override the formatting before you output the data to a file.

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So if I run Get‑Process s*, I can pipe that across to,

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say, Format‑List and then pipe that down to Out‑File.

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The ‑FilePath parameter is positional, so I don't need to specify the parameter,

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and I can just type the path of the file.

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And I'll use the same one, being C:\Docs\process.txt.

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I'll up arrow to get the Notepad command again.

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And this time you can see we've got the list format in the external text file.

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Notice that I used the same file name,

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and it didn't ask me if I want to overwrite the file.

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That's the default behavior.

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And if you want to stop that from happening,

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you can use this ‑NoClobber parameter to prevent an

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existing file from being overwritten.

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And we'll get an error to say that this file already exists.

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Out‑File has an ‑Append parameter.

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So notice I've taken the Format‑List command out of the pipeline,

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but I'm using the ‑Append parameter.

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I'll open up the file again in Notepad,

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and we've got our original list format from a few commands ago.

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And if I scroll down towards the bottom here,

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we'll see the table output has been appended to the

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same file from the cmdlet I just ran.

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The parameter named ‑NoNewLine will ensure the content written to

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the file doesn't end with a new line character.

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The string representations of the object being specified

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are concatenated to form the output.

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Notepad is doing a bit of wrapping here,

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but this entire output is actually on a single line.

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Another parameter is named ‑Width,

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which is where you can tell PowerShell how many characters

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should be present on each line of the output.

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Any additional characters are truncated; they aren't wrapped.

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Let's set that width to 20 and then open the file in Notepad.

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And we've only got the first 20 characters of each line in the default output.

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The Out cmdlets all have a parameter named ‑InputObject,

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so in the examples above, the data was being piped to Out‑File,

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but you can use the ‑InputObject parameter and specify the data to be output.

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So let's create a variable named process,

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and we'll use that to store the processes starting with s.

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You can then just call Out‑File on its own and use the

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‑InputObject parameter to specify the variable where the

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objects are stored that you want to output,

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and then specify the ‑FilePath for the file to output to.

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If we check that with Notepad, functionally,

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this is the same as piping the data to Out‑File.

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But it's just another way of specifying the data to be output.

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In the previous clip,

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I mentioned that you can't pipe Out cmdlets to another cmdlet because

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Out cmdlets remove the objects from the pipeline,

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and they send the data out of the PowerShell system.

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Out‑File saves the data to a file,

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but it does not produce any output objects to the pipeline.

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Let me get the processes starting with s again and pop that across to Out‑File.

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And then we can pipe that down to Get‑Member.

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Get‑Member errors out here,

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telling us that we must specify an object for the Get‑Member cmdlet.

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So this shows that nothing is being sent down the pipeline from Out‑File.

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There's something else I want to cover here briefly,

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and it isn't specifically related to Out‑File,

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but it is related to getting output from PowerShell to text files.

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And you might be familiar with this from command.exe days.

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And that is using the redirection operators to get

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data from PowerShell out to a file.

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I want to show you the help file named about_redirection,

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and there are a couple of things I'd like to highlight in here.

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As we've learned, by default, PowerShell sends its output to the console,

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but we can direct the output to a text file instead.

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There are these things called streams, which we'll see more about in a moment.

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But, interestingly,

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you can also redirect the error output to the regular output stream.

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And over here, it lists a few ways to redirect output,

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the first being to use Out‑File, which is what we've worked through here.

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And in this help document,

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they note that you'd typically use Out‑File when you want to use its parameters.

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There's another cmdlet named Tee‑Object.

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And, lastly, you can use these things called redirection operators.

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If I press space to page on to the next screen in the help document,

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we get some information about the redirection operators.

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I'm not going to go through all of this with you.

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You're obviously welcome to do that in your own time.

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But a couple of things to highlight here are in the middle,

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and these are all of the output streams available in

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PowerShell to output different types of data.

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And the default stream, if you don't specify one,

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is Stream #1, the SUCCESS Stream.

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At the very bottom, it starts to tell us what the redirection operators are,

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and this first one that's on screen, you may be familiar with,

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which is the greater‑than sign.

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And that sends the specified stream to a file.

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I'll page down here just once more, and at the very top,

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there's another operator, which is two greater‑than signs,

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which will append the specified stream to a file.

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And this last syntax here allows you to redirect one of

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the other streams to the success stream.

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Let's do a quick example of that in the console.

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If we run Get‑Process again,

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we can just then use the greater‑than symbol as the redirection operator

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and then specify the name of the file to output to.

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I'll fire that up in Notepad.

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And, sure enough,

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we get the same output that we were getting with Out‑File

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because it's effectively doing the same thing.

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Back in the console, if we bring up that same command,

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but I'll go back to add another greater‑than symbol,

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this is telling PowerShell to append the data to the file.

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So this is exactly the same as using Out‑File with the ‑Append parameter.

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Depending on what you're doing in the shell,

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you might find yourself using the redirection operator,

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but Out‑File definitely can be useful if you need some extra controls around the output.