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Script blocks are really cool things.

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Not only can you save a block of code and rerun it easily,

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you can also add parameters to your script block,

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and this is what it looks like.

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So I have a script block, $sb, that's going to basically run Get‑WinEvent,

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but I want to be able to pass to the script block the log name that I want to

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query, as well as the number of events that I want to get.

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So we're going to add a Param block at the beginning of the script block.

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So after the opening curly brace you can put in Param, and then in

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parentheses a comma‑separated list of your parameter. So the parameter

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will be a variable, and we'll use that variable in the code. So I've got

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$log and $count as the parameters, and you can see that they are used as

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$log and $count in the code.

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It's very important that you understand that parameters are all

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positional, so when we go to use parameters,

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you really have to specify all of them and you have

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to do them all in the same order.

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We can't specify them by name, it's just, as you'll see, it's just by value.

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So the way that this works then, because they are by value,

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you would invoke the script block,

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so there's the &$sb, and then specify all of the

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parameter values that you want to pass.

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So I'm passing system 2, so system will go to log and 2 will go to count,

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and Get‑WinEvent will then run Get‑WinEvent ‑log system ‑maximum count 2,

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and then that output will be sent to the pipeline and go on to Format‑List

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to format the display for me. As you see,

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you can use the invoke operator, the ampersand, and the

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parameters are separated by spaces.

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There's no commas, we don't name anything,

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you just specify the value, and here's the result that you can get.

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So again, I've been able to use that script block to simplify running my code.

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If I want to check a different event log or get a different number of events,

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I can easily rerun the script block and just specify different parameter values.

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If you are using Invoke‑Command,

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especially when you get to doing stuff with remoting,

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you're going to use the ‑ArgumentList parameter, and here you are going to

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separate the parameter values for your script block by commas.

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So here I've got System,2, so again, they're all positional.

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When you get to remoting,

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you'll be using Invoke‑Command quite a bit, and being able to specify different

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arguments for your script blocks is kind of a handy thing.

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Keep in mind, you have to specify all of the parameters, and

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in order, so I try to keep the number of parameters I need

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in the script block limited.

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There are other ways that you can pass values into a

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script block with Invoke‑Command,

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but that's kind of outside the scope of what we're going to cover in this course.