Best way to write to the console in PowerShell

Question

I am having a little confusion about the various ways to print  echo  to the console  I have seen that there are multiple ways to write output to the console  such as   Write-Host  Hello world1   Hello World2  Out-Host -InputObject  Hello World3    All three ways will print to the console  The middle one is somehow simpler and less verbose and easier to use  I also find that when you write a function such as   function GetValues          1       2      It still returns two strings in the pipeline   And I m still able to print out the values   foreach   s in GetValues        Write-Host  s     s     The thing that I have found was that using just the quoted string doesn t always appear on custom hosts  and that I have had to use Write-Host to get values to print on custom hosts   Somehow I find this confusing  Is  Print something  supposed to be an alias to Write-Host or what is the intent

User · Accepted Answer

Default behaviour of PowerShell is just to dump everything that falls out of a pipeline without being picked up by another pipeline element or being assigned to a variable (or redirected) into Out-Host. What Out-Host does is obviously host-dependent.

Just letting things fall out of the pipeline is not a substitute for Write-Host which exists for the sole reason of outputting text in the host application.

If you want output, then use the Write-* cmdlets. If you want return values from a function, then just dump the objects there without any cmdlet.

User · Answer

The middle one writes to the pipeline  Write-Host and Out-Host writes to the console   echo  is an alias for Write-Output which writes to the pipeline as well  The best way to write to the console would be using the Write-Host cmdlet   When an object is written to the pipeline it can be consumed by other commands in the chain  For example    hello world    Do-Something   but this won t work since Write-Host writes to the console  not to the pipeline  Do-Something will not get the string    Write-Host  hello world    Do-Something

[powershell] Best way to write to the console in PowerShell

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