Category: PowerShell

PowerShell one-liners sometimes are an easy way to achieve something quickly. There are cases where you might want to run multiple separated PowerShell commands on one line. This can be handy if you do copy pasting of commands or if you want to make it easy for the end-user when you need to troubleshoot something. In this blog post, we will look at how you can chain and run multiple PowerShell commands on one line using pipelines and chaining commands.

PowerShell Pipelines

In many cases, you will be happy to use pipelines in PowerShell. A pipeline is a series of commands connected by pipeline operators (|). Each pipeline operator sends the results of the preceding command to the next command.

For example, you can do things like get a process and then stop that process.

Get-Process "notepad" | Stop-Process

This will get the notepad process and pipe it to the next command, which will then stop that process. This is a great way to get the result from one PowerShell command to the other if these commands are related.

Chaining multiple PowerShell commands in one line

But what about if these commands are not related and have nothing to do with each other? In bash for example we can use && to chain commands and put two commands together. In PowerShell, we can achieve a similar thing using firstcommand; secondcommand. Expect that in this case, it will run the second command even if the first command fails. So for example in PowerShell you can use chaining:

Get-Process "notepad"; start "https://www.thomasmaurer.ch"

In this case, we still do the first task, which is getting the notepad process, but we also want to open a website. If you can, it really makes sense to use PowerShell pipelines. However, if you want to do run multiple unrelated commands on the same line, you can use the firstcommand; secondcommand method. In this case, the second command gets executed even if the first command fails.

This is also handy if one of the commands, for example, is a PowerShell command and the other might just a command-line tool.

This is nothing new and is working with Windows PowerShell 5.1 (and earlier) as well as PowerShell 7.

Pipeline Chain Operators

One of the new features in PowerShell 7 are the && and || operators to chain pipelines based on conditions. These operators are known in PowerShell as pipeline chain operators. They work very simply. The && operator would execute the right-hand pipeline if the left-hand pipeline succeeded. The || operator would run the right-hand pipeline if the left-hand pipeline failed.

Get-Process "notepad" && start "https://www.thomasmaurer.ch"

If the notepad process was running, it would open the website. If notepad isn’t running, this command would just provide an error that the process “notepad” could not be found.

Get-Process "notepad" || Start-Process notepad

With this command, we would see if the notepad process is running. If it is running, the second command doesn’t get executed. If the notepad process is not running, this would now run the second command, which would start the notepad process.

Make sure you check out the other new PowerShell 7 features. There is some cool stuff in there, like PowerShell Predictive IntelliSense, and much more.

Conclusion

You can see there are many different ways you can chain commands in PowerShell depending on your needs. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

Azure PowerShell is one of my preferred ways to build automation and manage Microsoft Azure. However, as Damien Caro (Microsoft Program Manager) mentions, the Azure PowerShell modules has over 4,000 cmdlets and, on average, ten parameters per cmdlet. This can make it hard to find the right cmdlet and parameter for what you want to do. To make this easier, the team created the Az Predictor, an intelligent command completion module for Azure PowerShell. Az Predictor will help you with predictions when you run Azure PowerShell.

In the last couple of days and weeks, I started to try out the new PowerShell Predictive IntelliSense and Az Predictor, and together with the PSReadline version, and I wouldn’t work without it anymore. it kind of reminds me of the AI-supported Azure CLI command in az find.

Az Predictor helps our Azure developers find the cmdlet they are looking for efficiently, identify the required parameters quickly, and experience fewer errors.
We worked closely with the PowerShell team to have Az be the first module that leverages this new interface and bring suggestions to the developer’s fingertips. Az Predictor takes the context of the current session into account in its suggestions. With Az Predictor’s context-aware suggestions users will be guided through the discovery of cmdlets and will not need to go to the online help as often.

Damien Caro – Microsoft Program Manager

You can read more in the official announcement blog on Microsoft Tech Community and preview 2 here.

Az Predictior Modes for Azure PowerShell

Inline mode – Suggestions of parameters and values will appear on the rest of the command line.

Listview mode – This will show several suggestions below the command line with the complete parameter set displayed.

Getting started with Az Predictor

Az Predictor is currently a module in preview in the PowerShell gallery. It leverages the subsystem plugin model that is available after PowerShell 7.2 and used by PSReadline 2.2.2.

You can learn more about this in my PowerShell Deep Dive reaction video.

Requirements

• PowerShell 7.2 (PowerShell 7 can run side by side with Windows PowerShell 5.1)
• PSReadline 2.2.2 – Learn more about PSReadline 2.2.0

Install Az Predictor

To install and get started just follow these easy steps:

1. Install PowerShell 7.2
2. Install PSReadline 2.2
   Install-Module PSReadline -Force
3. Install Az.Tools.Predictor preview
   Install-Module -Name Az.Tools.Predictor
4. Enable the plugins
   Enable-AzPredictor -AllSession
5. Enable the list view mode (Optional)
   Set-PSReadLineOption -PredictionViewStyle ListView

If you want to load Az predictor every time you start PowerShell (and trust me you want that 😉), you can add the last three commands to your PowerShell profile.

I usually use the following in my setup:

Install-Module -Name PSReadline -force
Install-Module -Name Az.Tools.Predictor
Enable-AzPredictor -AllSession
Set-PSReadLineOption -PredictionViewStyle ListView
Set-PSReadLineOption -Colors @{ InlinePrediction = "$([char]0x1b)[36;7;238m"}

Conclusion and Feedback

I hope this blog provides you with an overview of this awesome new module, which allows you to predict your Azure PowerShell commands. The team is currently looking for feedback so log issues, feature requests, or design changes on GitHub, and take a moment to fill this brief survey.

If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment.