Pipelines

The pipeline is one of the most prominent features of PowerShell. The pipeline is used to send output from one command (standard out or Stdout) into another command (standard in or Stdin).

Standard output

The term standard output is used because there are different kinds of output. Each of these different forms of output is referred to as a stream.

When assigning the output of a command to a variable, the values are taken from the standard output (the output stream) of a command. For example, the following command assigns the data from the standard output to a variable:

$stdout = Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_ComputerSystem 

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