Here’s an age-old debate that we can finally, perhaps, put an end to: The backtick character for line continuation.
The basic concept looks like this:

Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_BIOS -ComputerName whatever -Filter "something='else'"This trick relies on the fact that the backtick (grave accent) is PowerShell’s escape character. In this case, it’s escaping the carriage return, turning it from a logical end-of-line marker into a literal carriage return. It makes commands with a lot of parameters easier to read, since you can line up the parameters as I’ve done.
My personal beefs with this:

The character is visually hard to distinguish. On-screen, it’s just a couple of pixels; in a book, it looks like stray ink or toner.

• If you put any whitespace after the backtick, it escapes that character instead of the carriage return, and everything breaks.
• On some non-US keyboards, it’s a difficult character to get to.

In  many cases, you can achieve nice formatting without the back tick.

Do-Something -Parameter this | Get-Something -Parameter those -Parm these | Something-Else -This that -Foo bar This is because a carriage return after a pipe, semicolon, or comma is always interpreted as a visual thing, and not as a logical end of line. Of course, some argue that you can make that command prettier by using the back tick:

Do-Something -Param this | Something-Else -this that -foo bar | Invoke-Those -these thoseHere, the pipes line up on the front, making the command into a kind of visual block - but you have to rely on the backticks. You could then argue that a combination of splatting and careful formatting could be nicer, without the backticks:

$do_something = @{parameter = $this; foo = $bar} $invoke_something = @{param = $these; param = $those} Do-Something @do_something | Invoke-Something @invoke_something | Something-Else Visually blocked-out, but no back ticks.
And the debate rages on. Your thoughts? Pros? Cons? Why?

[boilerplate greatdebate]