The first point to remember is that $_ is a variable or placeholder. Whether its logs or files comparison orrrr feeding a list to the script to store and use as a variable, you will need to read a file from your script. Using Get-Content to read the file and Set-Content to write to file, it’s possible. PowerShell Variables. Here, the $_ is a pipeline variable that represents the current line from the contents that come from Get-Content. View this "Best Answer" in … Thankfully Powershell has the Get-Content cmdlet which will read a file with just one line of code. You end up with an array of strings. The -Raw parameter will bring the entire contents in as a multi-line string. Besides Where-Object, you can also use match and regex operators to find the exact text you want. PowerShell variables without “value” More often than not, we create variables with the intent they will hold a value. A variable is a unit of memory in which values are stored. I’d like to read each server’s status and output that to a file. We can inspect the content of the CSV file using get-content. PowerShell’s $_ Variable; The Significance of the Dot in PowerShell’s $_. Get-Content is the goto command for reading data. We can clearly see that the output of the custom object and the CSV file is exactly the same. This shows that every element in the CSV file is surrounded by double-quotes. It may be about getting a token from a single line of text or about turning the text output of native tools into structured objects so I can leverage the power of PowerShell. The first task is to create a set of server names in code. Get-Content is a highly versatile cmdlet that comes loaded with many options. By using Get-Content and Set-content, you can make this happen. Maybe I’ve got a text file with one server and their status per line. More options with Get-Content. The `|` character in between the two commands is the “pipe” which indicates that instead of displaying the output of the Get-Content command in the PowerShell command window, it should instead pass that data to the next script (the Measure-Object cmdlet). The most common way to do that is by creating an array. Examples of the PowerShell $_ Variable. This sounds like a great chance to try out the most common PowerShell loop used; the foreach loop. This also passes each one down the pipe nicely. Using Get-Content Cmdlet to read a text file Get-Content "D:\text_file.txt" A variable in PowerShell begins with “$” (dollar sign) and its name can contain any letters, numbers and underscores. To display the value of a variable, simply enter the variable. Get-Content c:\documents\myfile.txt | Measure-Object -word. To assign a value to a variable, we use the “=” operator. Hi, You can just use a ForEach-Object loop and skip all of that: Get-ADGroupMember -Identity 'Test Group 1' -Recursive | ForEach-Object { Write-Host "The current item in the loop is $($_.Name)" -ForegroundColor Green } Import data with Get-Content -Raw. Learn the difference between a null, empty string, and white space value for a PowerShell variable and how to test for them. This comes to show how similar PowerShell objects and CSV file contents are two Powershell. Beginning in Windows PowerShell 3.0, this cmdlet can also get a specified number of lines from the beginning or end of an item.In file system drives, you can use the the Get-Content cmdlet to get content that you display at the command line, save in a variable … More PowerShell Variables; PowerShell’s $_ Variable. $_ Example to Filter WmiObjects; PowerShell $_ with ForEach $_. Get-Content-Path 'C:\Users\bob\whatever.txt' | Get-Member Which will give you a list of them and a basic description of what inputs they take. 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