Quick PowerShell tip: how to take only a single property from a result set?

Today's topic is a quick tip about PowerShell. Assume for instance you need to list certain items, and these items contain numerous properties of which you need only one.

For instance, you might be enumerating the currently running processes with the "Get-Process" cmdlet. This command would return a process object with around half a dozen properties:

[PS]> Get-Process

Handles  NPM(K)    PM(K)      WS(K) VM(M)   CPU(s)     Id ProcessName
-------  ------    -----      ----- -----   ------     -- -----------
    119       4    12776      14572    48            1516 audiodg
     44       2     1460       3420    34     0,05   3160 conime
    533       5     1568       5008   108             500 csrss
    541       8    17304      18792   190             564 csrss
...

But what if you wanted to list only for instance the process names currently running? How would you filter that? Enter the "select" cmdlet, which is an alias for Select-Object. After this, you could write something like this:

[PS]> Get-Process | Select-Object ProcessName

ProcessName
-----------
audiodg
conime
csrss
csrss
...

In addition to simply specifying the column (property) you prefer, you can also select top N or last N objects (records), select multiple properties (separate them with a comma), and more. To learn about this, check the TechNet documentation page.

Keywords: filter results, select single property, single column only.