Dealing with pipeline data

Since commands on the pipeline have access to object properties, several general-purpose cmdlets exist to perform common operations. Since these cmdlets can work with any kind of object, they use Object as the noun (you remember the Verb-Noun naming convention for cmdlets, right?).

To find the list of these cmdlets, we can use the Get-Command cmdlet:

Tip

ft is an alias for the Format-Table cmdlet, which I'm using here to get the display to fit more nicely on the screen. It will be covered in depth in Chapter 5, Formatting Output.

The Sort-Object, Select-Object, and Where-Object cmdlets are some of the most used cmdlets in PowerShell.

The Sort-Object cmdlet

Sorting data can be interesting. Have you ever sorted a list of numbers only to find that 11 came between 1 and 2? That's because the sort that you used treated the numbers as text. Sorting dates with all the different culture-specific formatting can also be a challenge. Fortunately, PowerShell handles sorting details...