PSObject, and splatting / formatting Cim_LogicalDisk returns

Hi, newbie to the forum.

Given the classic Get-DiskInfo type of POSH query, how would I display the results in a table, if splatting properties to a PSObject?

If I ship this across to a remote server:

$disk = Get-CimInstance -Class CIM_LogicalDisk -CimSession $session | where drivetype -like 3
The return is nominally:
DeviceID DriveType VolumeName Size           FreeSpace 
-------- --------- ---------- ----           -------- 
C:       3         Drive C    498892533760   85959804928 
E:       3         Drive E    24000140926976 14336094912512
If I create a hash-table and a new PSObject
$property = @{
Name = $disk.name
Label = $disk.volumeName
Size = $disk.size
Freespace = $disk.freespace
}
$object = New-Object PSObject -property $property
The display is:
PS C:\powershell> $object

Label Name Size Freespace


{Drive C, Drive E} {C:, E:} {498892533760, 24000140926976} {385959804928, 14336094912512}

1) I'd like to get this to format as one might see in Format-Table, that C and E are on separate lines.
  1. How would I format the Size and Freespace in GB (similarly to “{0:N2}”), where I get 2 decimal places?
Many thanks,

Seth

The first part of your issue is that you have two objects, not one, but the way you’re creating your final object means you’re squashing them into a single object. This is what causes the lines to be merged; if you go about it differently, this won’t happen.

The second part is a trickier question. The easy answer is with a calculated property from Select-Object, which modifies the data to display what you want. I’ll come back to the trickier answer in a moment.

As you can see, you have a few options! But the core of the matter is that you have a collection of objects, so you either need to continue along the pipeline to enumerate them, or opt to enumerate them yourself with `foreach` or `ForEach-Object` when building your result objects. Multiple lines in a table = multiple output objects.

The trickier answer I mentioned before is that you can keep your raw data in bytes if you wish and delegate the display to PS’s formatting subsystem. Doing so is more complicated than I can really cover in a short forum post. Kevin Marquette covers it partially in one of his deep dive posts on PSCustomObject.

Thank you for the ideas, Joel! I’ll give Kevin’s presentation a good read.

Generally, I have a Franken-script, hacked from Internet ideas, that uses Select-Object and the formatting math. Personal challenge is to make it more elegant.

Cheers,

Seth

Hi, Joel,

I learned a lot from your code of building with a hash-table. Many thanks for your explanation. From your example, I can see the flow through the pipeline.

What I didn’t catch before was using “foreach-object”. I’ve not previously used this cmdlet, so I had to overcome a reading bias that it was the classic foreach. Nope, two different things.

I played with a few permutations of trying to get a pre-made PSObject fed into the script block using -ArgumentList, perhaps the way Invoke-Command can be fed a variable that exists locally

-Scriptblock {param($some_param) Do-This -parameter $some_param} -ArgumentList $some_param

Fun to try, just to see. But, ForEach-Object doesn’t seem work that way, learned that, moving on.

Cheers,

Seth