Number manipulation

Basic mathematical operation in PowerShell makes use of the operators discussed in Chapter 5, Operators.

Formatting numbers using the format operators are introduced along with a number of features:

'{0:x}' -f 24244      # Lower-case hexadecimal. Returns 5eb4 
'{0:X}' -f 24244      # Upper-case hexadecimal. Returns 5EB4 
'{0:P}' -f 0.28232    # Percentage. Returns 28.23% 
'{0:N2}' -f 32583.122 # Culture specific number format. 
                      # 2 decimal places. 
                      # Returns 32,583.12 (for en-GB) 

The format operator is powerful, but it has one major shortcoming: It returns a string. It is great for when you want to display a number to a user, but will prevent sorting or work with the numeric form.

Large byte values

PowerShell provides operators for working with bytes. These operators are as follows:

• nKB: Kilobytes (n * 1024¹)
• nMB: Megabytes (n * 1024²)
• nGB: Gigabytes (n * 1024³)
• nTB: Terabytes (n * 1024⁴)
• nPB: Petabytes (n * 1024⁵)

These operators can...