Vista - Having hard time with Get-Member

The way I see it so far is that Get-member is a very powerful and
helpful command when playing with powershell

I'm still a newbie with Powershell, but I'm having sometimes hard time
to understand few things

PS > "hello".length
5

I've learnt about .length by typing
PS > "hello" | get-member

and I found the property length
Length Property System.Int32 Length {get;}

I'm reading Power Shell Pocket reference, and I found this example:

PS >(dir).Count
2276

So I thought that I will find the count property of dir (or get-
childintem) by typing
PS > dir | get-member
or
PS > child-item | get-member

but I'm cannot find it

Is this normal ?
Am I missing something ?

On Nov 22, 9:13*am, Personne <cpdiv...@xxxxxx> wrote:One of the weird quirks about PowerShell is that an operation that
returns an array will automatically just return the object instead of
the array if there is only one element. Count is a property of an
array. If only one item is returned, then Count doesn't exist.

You can force it to consider the output to be an array by putting @()
around the value.

Example:

(dir some_exact_filename.txt)

Will not have a Count property, but

@(dir some_exact_filename.txt)

will have a Count property.

How did you figure that out ?

So following you idea, I tried this

(dir some_exact_filename.txt) | get-member *co*
and
@(dir some_exact_filename.txt) | get-member *co*

and no count property show up !!!

I'm sad, very sad

On Nov 22, 4:04*pm, Personne <cpdiv...@xxxxxx> wrote:Ah, this is another caveat. When you pass an array to a pipe, Get-
Member grabs each item INSIDE the array and processes it. To see the
array itself you need to use the input parameter.

Try this:
gm -in @(dir some_exact_filename.txt)

And in my case I found it out by trial and error, but I hope someone
out there has a more authoritative (and less frustrating) source to
suggest.

Tojo2000 and Shay thank you

Because I like to learn, I would like to know where I can find about
this ,@(xxx) syntax.
I knew about @(xxx) but never see ,@(xxx) before today

Check the Windows PowerShell Team Blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/arc...owershell.aspx



---
Shay Levy
Windows PowerShell MVP
http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/ScriptFanatic
PowerShell Toolbar: http://tinyurl.com/PSToolbar



P> Tojo2000 and Shay thank you
P>
P> Because I like to learn, I would like to know where I can find about
P> this ,@(xxx) syntax.
P> I knew about @(xxx) but never see ,@(xxx) before today