In Powershell, what's the best way to join two tables into one?

Question

I'm fairly new to Powershell, and am wondering if someone knows of any better way to accomplish the following example problem.

I have an array of mappings from IP address to host-name. This represents a list of active DHCP leases:

PS H:\> $leases

IP                    Name
--                    ----
192.168.1.1           Apple
192.168.1.2           Pear
192.168.1.3           Banana
192.168.1.99          FishyPC

I have another array of mappings from MAC address to IP address. This represents a list of IP reservations:

PS H:\> $reservations

IP                    MAC
--                    ---
192.168.1.1           001D606839C2
192.168.1.2           00E018782BE1
192.168.1.3           0022192AF09C
192.168.1.4           0013D4352A0D

For convenience, I was able to produce a third array of mappings from MAC address to IP address and host name using the following code. The idea is that $reservations should get a third field, "Name", which is populated whenever there's a matching "IP" field:

$reservations = $reservations | foreach {
    $res = $_
    $match = $leases | where {$_.IP -eq $res.IP} | select -unique
    if ($match -ne $NULL) {
        "" | select @{n="IP";e={$res.IP}}, @{n="MAC";e={$res.MAC}}, @{n="Name";e={$match.Name}}
    }
}

The desired output is something like this:

PS H:\> $ideal

IP                    MAC                 Name
--                    ---                 ----
192.168.1.1           001D606839C2        Apple
192.168.1.2           00E018782BE1        Pear
192.168.1.3           0022192AF09C        Banana
192.168.1.4           0013D4352A0D

Is there any better way of doing this?

Answer 1

Lee Holmes wrote up a blog post on a Join-Object function that does what you want. Too bad it isn't built into PowerShell yet.