Question

I am writing a script where I would like to spit out a bunch of records and then display the count as the last line. This is what I have so far:

Get-Whatever -Department $Deparment
Write-Host (Get-Whatever -Department $Deparment).Count " records found"

But i’m curious if there is a way to do it without executing it twice. I thought that I had read you could use $$ somewhere but this isn’t working. Is there a better way to do this, or do I just have to run it twice?

My Desired output would look something like this:

Name
-------
Abe
Joe
Bill

3 records found

Answer 1

Why don’t you simply assign the result to a variable?

$d = @(Get-Whatever -dep $department); $d
Write-Host $d.Count records found

Note the @(..). It ensures that even when Get-Whatever doesn’t return anything, $d will be empty array.

Other way is e.g. Tee-Object. However, it somewhat “magically” creates variables, so it is not as readable as the first approach:

Get-ChildItem | Tee-Object -var items
Write-Host $items.Count items found

As for Tee-Object (from documentation, try help tee-object -online):

The Tee-Object cmdlet sends the output
of a command in two directions (like
the letter “T”). It stores the output
in a file or variable and also sends
it down the pipeline. If Tee-Object is
the last command in the pipeline, the
command output is displayed in the
console.