Getting complex – More line breaks in Powershell
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:
$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:
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:
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' )
}
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