Writing Output from Powershell

One of the things we often want to do when building a PoSh script is to get some output. I first learned about Write-Host, but I learned over time that this isn’t the best way to do this. Most of the early scripts I saw used this, so I was confused until I went through a few of this post: Write-Host Considered Harmful. This is from Jeffrey Snover, the inventor of PoSh.

In the post, he notes that most of the time we don’t want to use Write-Host, because this means we can’t use the output of a command in the pipeline. For debugging you might think that this doesn’t matter, but Write-Debug is better.

He recommend Write-Output, which is something I want to start to use. That, or Write-Verbose, so the user can get more or less output as needed.

Hopefully this will help me to better write PoSh code that others can easily use.