Topic: Get-Member Continued

Notice: This post is a part of the PowerShell Monday series — a group of quick and easy to read mini lessons that briefly cover beginning and intermediate PowerShell topics. As a PowerShell enthusiast, this seemed like a beneficial way to ensure those around me at work were consistently learning new things about Windows PowerShell. At some point, I decided I would share these posts here, as well. Here’s the PowerShell Monday Table of Contents.

If nearly everything in PowerShell is an object, then let’s look at two of the members — properties and methods — of our two results, ’55’ and 10. Typically, we pipe to Get-Member. In the first example, we’ll recreate our string value of ’55’ and see what we can learn about it.

$x = '5' + '5'
$x

55

$x | Get-Member

  TypeName: System.String

In the above results, I’ve included only the TypeName of the object for now, and haven’t yet included all the properties and methods returned by Get-Member, that we’ll see momentarily. The TypeName indicates that the object is a string object.

In the more complete, Get-Member results, I’ve included the first several methods and the one and only property. As the value in $x is a string, there’s not much to it, property wise. In this case, there’s just a length property. In the below results, I haven’t include the Definition property. If you run these commands yourself, don’t be surprised to see a third property, or column, included.

  TypeName: System.String

Name             MemberType
----             ----------
Clone            Method
CompareTo        Method
Contains         Method
CopyTo           Method
EndsWith         Method
Equals           Method
GetEnumerator    Method
GetHashCode      Method
...
Length           Property

Let’s return the length property to see the length of the string stored in the variable $x. The value is ’55’, so a length of two would make sense. Let’s double-check.

$x.Length

2

Let’s recreate our numeric value of 55, as well, and pipe it to Get-Member.

$y = 5 + 5
$y

10

$y | Get-Member

  TypeName: System.Int32

Name           MemberType
----           ----------
CompareTo      Method
Equals         Method
GetHashCode    Method
GetType        Method
GetTypeCode    Method
ToBoolean      Method
ToByte         Method
ToChar         Method
ToDateTime     Method
ToDecimal      Method
ToDouble       Method
ToInt16        Method
ToInt32        Method
ToInt64        Method
ToSByte        Method
ToSingle       Method
ToString       Method
ToType         Method
ToUInt16       Method
ToUInt32       Method
ToUInt64       Method

The variable $y is storing an integer object, and according to Get-Member, doesn’t include any properties. That’s a good start for this holiday Monday. Next week, we’ll start working with some of the different methods.