What are Your PowerShell Newbie Gotchas?
I’m putting together a list of common “gotchas” for PowerShell, mainly things that affect newcomers. So far, I’ve got:
- Piping the output of a Format cmdlet to nearly anything else
- Using -contains instead of -like
- Selecting a subset of object properties and then trying to sort/fiter on a now-missing property
- Wrong syntax for -filter parameters on various commands
- Commands that don’t produce pipeline output (e.g., piping Export-CSV to something)
- Using ConvertTo-HTML without -Fragment and appending multiple pages in one file
- Confusion with ( [ { and the other punctuation
- Concatenating strings (hard) vs. using double quotes (easier)
- $ not being part of the variable name (esp with -ErrorVariable)
- Accumulating objects in a variable and returning it, vs. outputting to the pipeline directly
What are your “gotchas?”
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