Powershell, paginating output from foreach

Question

Seems like this should be simple, but powershell is winning another battle with me. Simply wanting to output the name of all the services running on a system, and their executable path, and pipe that into something I can use to search through it like Less.

So far I have:

$services = get-WmiObject -query 'select * from win32_service'
foreach($service in $services){$service.Name $service.Pathname} | less

But thats giving me the "An empty pipe element is not allowed." that I seem to have come up alot. Anyone tell me how to fix this, either by outputting to a file and Ill go through it with vim, or pipe to page/less/etc so I can do quick scan (with my eyes not programically quite yet).

Answer 1

Try doing the following

$services | %{ $_.Pathname } | less

EDIT Add multiple to the path

$services | %{ "{0} {1}" -f $_.Pathname,$_.Name } | less

Answer 2

Looks like a good reason to use foreach-object:

$services = get-WmiObject -query 'select * from win32_service'
$services|ForEach-Object {$_|Select-Object Name,Pathname}|less

Please excuse me while I oneline it:

get-WmiObject -query 'select * from win32_service' |ForEach-Object {$_|Select-Object Name,Pathname}|less

foreach-object will return an object to the pipeline based on the input object.

I'm assuming less is an alias of your own making since I don't seem to have it.

Answer 3

If you are using PowerShell 2.0, you might like this:

gwmi win32_service | select-object Name,PathName | ogv

ogv (Output-GridView) is a new cmdlet in 2.0.

Answer 4

get-wmiobject win32_service | select-object name, pathname | more

This is also powershell 2.0 and is the close to the comment above. You were just trying to use a foreach when you didn't need to in this case.

Even with the foreach, you were close to getting an output you could work with. A comma in your foreach would have generated a output like a list and you could have used the more command instead of less.

$services = get-WmiObject -query 'select * from win32_service'
foreach($service in $services){$service.Name  $service.Pathname} | more

Here is another way to write this same statement.

get-WmiObject win32_service | foreach{$.Name, $.Pathname} | more

This is still not the same as my first example, but I wanted to show you how close you were.