Vista - FEATURE REQUEST: redirecting output to non-file objects

It would be nice to be able to redirect output to objects that are not
files.

For instance:

$x = new-object Collections.ArrayList
doSomething >$x # collect items in ArrayList

or

$x = new-object Text.StringBuilder
doSomething >$x # collect items in a stringbuilder rather than a text file

You might say that I should simply write a function:

function toStringBuilder($sb)
{ begin { $local:sb = new-object Text.StringBuilder }
process { $sb.Append([string]$_) }
end { return $sb }
}

and do:

$sb = doSomething | toStringBuilder

But this does not work consistently. What if I want to send the ERROR stream
to it?

Redirection would handle it:

$x = new-object Text.StringBuilder
doSomething 2>$x # send errors to $x

A function would not, right?

"Adam Milazzo [MSFT]" <adamm@san.rr.com> wrote in message
news:Oyyji5avGHA.976@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
> It would be nice to be able to redirect output to objects that are not
> files.

Interesting idea but I think the problem you run into is that the shell
won't know which object member to use to append the pipeline object. I
guess the team could use a configuration file like they do for
type/formatting data. Still not sure if that is how I would expect the
system to work.

--
Keith

Keith Hill [MVP] wrote:
> "Adam Milazzo [MSFT]" <adamm@san.rr.com> wrote in message
> news:Oyyji5avGHA.976@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
>> It would be nice to be able to redirect output to objects that are not
>> files.
>
> Interesting idea but I think the problem you run into is that the shell
> won't know which object member to use to append the pipeline object. I
> guess the team could use a configuration file like they do for
> type/formatting data. Still not sure if that is how I would expect the
> system to work.

Yeah. Well, they could use the IList interface to work with any object
that supported it. That would take care of ArrayList and many other
collections.

I don't think this is such a great feature all by itself, but it'd be
useful in conjunction with the ability to background tasks (since they
couldn't output to the console, and outputting to a text file loses
information).

% longRunningTask >$list &
[1]+ longRunningTask (running)

% go about other work...

[1]- longRunningTask (complete)

% $list # get my results