This is a follow up to Jacob Moran’s article Keeping it simple – Line breaks in PowerShell.
I am strongly in the pro backtick camp, but I won’t get into that debate here. Instead, I’ll cover more of the common ground between the two camps.
In addition to after a pipe, there are many, many more places where you can put in a line break without a backtick and without breaking your code.
As a rule of thumb, any spot where the syntax unambiguously must be followed by something more, you can break the line.
As an extreme example, this:
|
$A = 1, 1 + 1, 3
$B = @( “a”, “b”, “c” ) If ( $A[2].ToString() -eq $B[2].Length -or (Get-Date).Date.DayOfWeek -eq ‘Tuesday’ ) { [pscustomobject]@{ Name = “x” } } |
Can be written like this:
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$A = 1,
1 + 1, 3 $B = @(
“a” “b” “c” ) If (
$A[ 2 ]. ToString( ) -eq $B[ 2 ]. Length -or ( Get-Date ). Date. DayOfWeek -eq ‘Tuesday’ ) { [ pscustomobject]@{ Name = “x” } } |
That example is, of course, silly.
But combine judicious use of the line break with appropriate horizontal whitespace, and you can turn this:
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If ( $SourceFile1.Length / 1Gb -gt $MaxSizeGB -and ( $SourceFile1.FullName -like “*\Accounting\*” -or $SourceFile1.FullName -like “*\Finance\*” ) )
{ $Destination = $SourceFile1.FullName.Replace( $SourceShare, $DestinationShare ).Replace( ‘\Accounting\’, ‘\ACC\’ ).Replace( ‘\Accounting\’, ‘\FIN\’ ) } |
Into this:
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If ( $SourceFile1.Length / 1Gb -gt $MaxSizeGB -and
( $SourceFile1.FullName -like “*\Accounting\*” -or $SourceFile1.FullName -like “*\Finance\*” ) ) { $Destination = $SourceFile1.FullName. Replace( $SourceShare, $DestinationShare ). Replace( ‘\Accounting\’, ‘\ACC\’ ). Replace( ‘\Accounting\’, ‘\FIN\’ ) } |
Great tip for a new PowerShell user!