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Hey everyone,

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and welcome back to the next step in learning how to put PowerShell to work.

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In this part of the course,

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we're going to dive a bit deeper into working with

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objects in the PowerShell pipeline.

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As you'll see, once you understand core PowerShell concepts,

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you can apply them to anything.

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It doesn't matter if it's a process or an Azure Virtual Machine.

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In most situations, especially when running PowerShell interactively,

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you want to let the PowerShell pipeline do a lot of the heavy lifting.

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Don't think about working with one thing at a time.

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Work with all of them at once.

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In this module,

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I want to go through some core PowerShell commands that

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you'll most likely use all the time.

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These are commands that treat all objects equally.

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In other words,

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a file object is no different than an Active

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Directory user or a virtual machine.

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Say you need to sort something.

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There aren't different sorting commands for files

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and users. It's the same command, Sort‑ Object.

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The command does exactly what that name implies.

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It doesn't care what the object represents. Give it a property name to sort on,

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and you're good to go.

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The same is true of grouping.

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This is a very useful command and one that I use very often.

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Grouping is the process of organizing objects into groups or

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buckets based on some common property.

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Again, the grouping process is the same whether it's a file,

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process, or virtual machine.

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Another common task, and one you'll be doing often,

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is selecting objects or parts of objects.

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By this I mean, maybe you're running a command to get a bunch of something,

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like Exchange mailboxes, but you really only need the first five items.

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Select‑Object is what makes this possible.

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This command has other features which will help you

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fine tune your PowerShell expression, and I'll get to those shortly.

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And lastly, PowerShell has a measurement command.

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Often an object will have some property with a numeric value,

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like the length or size of a file.

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Measure‑Object offers several simple mathematical

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measurements based on that value.

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To reiterate, we have one command to measure any type of object.

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And by the way, all of these commands have aliases,

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which is just the verb part of the name,

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like group, sort, and measure.

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You'll use these commands often and most likely together. We'll see some of that when I get to the demonstration.