Miniblog: Powershell Out-Gridview cmdlet

Normally I'm not so enthusiastic about a simple powershell cmdlet but in this case I wonder why I didn't find it earlier.

With Powershell you will end up with arrays of objects all the time. Visualizing them on the console can be tricky. Worse if you want to select a certain object, you will need to display them and then let the user input some number that corresponds with the object you want to select. Most of the time I will end up with using the in-line where clause to filter out objects but it is not really dynamic.

Until this morning I discovered the out-gridview. This cmdlet will take a stream of objects and show them in a GUI gridview. If you use the -passthru parameter it even allows you to select an object. To give you an example, here is a "Process killer" script in 1 line of code

Get-Process | Out-GridView -passthru -title "Kill me now" | % { Stop-Process $_ }

When you run it a gridview will appear:

 

Then you can select the filter view to filter out for example notepad. If you then select notepad and click ok, it will send the select object(s) down the pipeline where the foreach-object will iterate over the objects and stops the processes