Interacting with local machines

As mentioned earlier, PowerShell is deeply integrated with Windows at all levels. Let's look at an example of certain processes (system or PowerShell processes from Microsoft), running locally on the Windows machine:

Get-Process `
 | Where-Object {$_.company -like ‘*Microsoft*’}`
 | Where-Object {($_.ProcessName -like ‘*System*’) -or ($_.ProcessName -like ‘*powershell*’)}`
 | Format-Table ProcessName, Company -auto

The output is as follows (when executed from PowerShell console):

PS C:\Users\abhishek.ratan> Get-Process `
 | Where-Object {$_.company -like ‘*Microsoft*’}`
 | Where-Object {($_.ProcessName -like ‘*System*’) -or ($_.ProcessName -like ‘*powershell*’)}`
 | Format-Table ProcessName, Company -auto
ProcessName          Company
 -----------         -------
 powershell          Microsoft Corporation
 powershell_ise      Microsoft Corporation
 SystemSettings       Microsoft Corporation
 SystemSettingsBroker Microsoft Corporation

As we can see in this example, another feature of PowerShell is the piped command format support (|). Similar to Unix, a piped command in PowerShell is used to take objects, output from one cmdlet, easily send it to another cmdlet, and so on, until we granularize to a final output.

In this example, we took the output of Get-Process (which is a full process dump of our local machine), and filtered out the processes running from Microsoft Corporation. Then we further refine it to show only those processes that have the System or powershell in the name. The final output is piped to a tabular format with ProcessName and Company as the table header.