Skip to main content

How to Splat a Value with Multiple Arguments

Tonight I came upon a little different problem than usual.  Normally about this time of the night (9:00 PM in a different time zone than normal) I begin making all kinds of interesting logic errors.  Not tonight.  This evening I needed to splat a value with multiple arguments.  Yes, I know.  When I’m on these long business trips I can be absolutely boring.  I’m back home again in Indiana, and it is not the interesting part of the state.  That would be Brown County State Park.  No wilderness hiking this week. Back on topic, splatting allows you to provide a list of parameters and values to a PowerShell cmdlet in an organized way that prevents horizontal scrolling.  Best of all, no use of the back tick character. 

In this example, I am looking at splatting the Property parameter of Get-CIMInstance  here is the help file for this parameter.

PS C:\> Get-help Get-CimInstance -Parameter Property

 

-Property <String[]>

    Specifies a set of instance properties to retrieve.

   

    Use this parameter when you need to reduce the size of the object returned, either in memory or over the network.

   

    The object returned always has key properties populated, irrespective of the set of properties listed by the

    Property parameter. Other properties of the class are present but they are not populated.

   

    Required?                    false

    Position?                    named

    Default value               

    Accept pipeline input?       True (ByPropertyName)

    Accept wildcard characters?  false

We can see that this property accepts multiple values.  Take a look at –Property <String[ ]>.  Those [ ] square brackets tells us that we can provide multiple values separated by commas.  I’ve never actually tried to splat more than 1 value per parameter so this took a few attempts to get it right.  Here we go!

   $Splat = @{

        'ClassName' = 'Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration'

        'Property' =Description’,IPAddress’,IPSubnet’   

        }

    Get-CimInstance @Splat

 

When you need to splat a parameter with multiple arguments, just make sure that each argument is encapsulated in its’ own set of quotes, then separate with a comma.  If you need to, press enter after a comma and add more arguments on the next line.  Again, a great way to avoid horizontal scrolling.

Time for bed.  I’ve got to teach Windows 8.1 in the morning.  Happy scripting!!!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Adding a Comment to a GPO with PowerShell

As I'm writing this article, I'm also writing a customization for a PowerShell course I'm teaching next week in Phoenix.  This customization deals with Group Policy and PowerShell.  For those of you who attend my classes may already know this, but I sit their and try to ask the questions to myself that others may ask as I present the material.  I finished up my customization a few hours ago and then I realized that I did not add in how to put a comment on a GPO.  This is a feature that many Group Policy Administrators may not be aware of. This past summer I attended a presentation at TechEd on Group Policy.  One organization in the crowd had over 5,000 Group Policies.  In an environment like that, the comment section can be priceless.  I always like to write in the comment section why I created the policy so I know its purpose next week after I've completed 50 other tasks and can't remember what I did 5 minutes ago. In the Group Policy module for PowerShell V3, th

Return duplicate values from a collection with PowerShell

If you have a collection of objects and you want to remove any duplicate items, it is fairly simple. # Create a collection with duplicate values $Set1 = 1 , 1 , 2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 1 , 2   # Remove the duplicate values. $Set1 | Select-Object -Unique 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 What if you want only the duplicate values and nothing else? # Create a collection with duplicate values $Set1 = 1 , 1 , 2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 1 , 2   #Create a second collection with duplicate values removed. $Set2 = $Set1 | Select-Object -Unique   # Return only the duplicate values. ( Compare-Object -ReferenceObject $Set2 -DifferenceObject $Set1 ) . InputObject | Select-Object – Unique 1 2 This works with objects as well as numbers.  The first command creates a collection with 2 duplicates of both 1 and 2.   The second command creates another collection with the duplicates filtered out.  The Compare-Object cmdlet will first find items that are diffe

How to list all the AD LDS instances on a server

AD LDS allows you to provide directory services to applications that are free of the confines of Active Directory.  To list all the AD LDS instances on a server, follow this procedure: Log into the server in question Open a command prompt. Type dsdbutil and press Enter Type List Instances and press Enter . You will receive a list of the instance name, both the LDAP and SSL port numbers, the location of the database, and its status.