The PowerShell Out-GridView cmdlet

There's a PowerShell cmdlet that I've seen before, but it's never quite lodged itself in my brain sufficiently for me to remember it and use it. It's Out-GridView and it's something that won't be of any use to you if you're running a Server Core installation, but if you've got GUI, you're good to go.

Running this: (yes, I know, 'dir' alias, yuk, etc!)

dir | Out-GridView -Title "Directory Contents"

Gives you this:

That's just a little bit cool, but it's a GUI, so what's so useful about it? Well,..... There's the "Filter" text box and the "Add Criteria" drop-down button. Anything you type into the "Filter" text box will be used to match, so type in "www" and everything except the last item will disappear. Type in "21:" and everything will stay visible - two have 21 as the hour, the other has it as the minute. Type in "21:37" and we'll say goodbye to "local.robertwray.co.uk". The "Add Criteria" drop-down button lets you build up complex, well, queries pretty much, like this one:

Once you've done all this, you can (as it's PowerShell) pipe the output to something else - like a CSV file (based on one of the examples in the linked docs.microsoft.com documentation):

dir | Out-GridView -Title "Directory Contents" -PassThru | Export-Csv -Path .\DirectoryList.csv