How do I output text without a newline in PowerShell

Question

I want my PowerShell script to print something like this   Enabling feature XYZ      Done   The script looks something like this   Write-Output  Enabling feature XYZ         Enable-SPFeature    Write-Output  Done    But Write-Output always prints a new-line at the end so my output isn t on one line  Is there a way to do this

User · Answer

To write to a file you can use a byte array. The following example creates an empty ZIP file, which you can add files to:

[Byte[]] $zipHeader = 80, 75, 5, 6, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
[System.IO.File]::WriteAllBytes("C:\My.zip", $zipHeader)

Or use:

[Byte[]] $text = [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.getBytes("Enabling feature XYZ.......")
[System.IO.File]::WriteAllBytes("C:\My.zip", $text)

User · Answer

Yes  as other answers have states  it cannot be done with Write-Output  Where PowerShell fails  turn to  NET  there are even a couple of  NET answers here but they are more complex than they need to be   Just use    Console   Write  Enabling feature XYZ          Enable-SPFeature    Write-Output  Done    It is not purest PowerShell  but it works

User · Answer

Write-Host is terrible  a destroyer of worlds  yet you can use it just to display progress to a user whilst using Write-Output to log  not that the OP asked for logging    Write-Output  Enabling feature XYZ    Out-File  log txt    Pipe to log file Write-Host -NoNewLine  Enabling feature XYZ          result   Enable-SPFeature  result   Out-File  log txt    You could try  catch   an exception on Enable-SPFeature depending on what it s doing if   result -ne  null        Write-Host  complete    else       Write-Host  failed

User · Answer

The following will place the cursor back at beginning of the previous row   It s up to you to place it in the right horizontal position  using  pos X to move it sideways     pos    host ui RawUI get cursorPosition    pos Y -  1  host UI RawUI set cursorPosition  Pos    Your current output is 27 spaces over  so  pos X   27 might work

User · Answer

While it may not work in your case  since you re providing informative output to the user   create a string that you can use to append output  When it s time to output it  just output the string   Ignoring of course that this example is silly in your case but useful in concept    output    Enabling feature XYZ         Enable-SPFeature     output     Done  Write-Output  output   Displays     Enabling feature XYZ       Done

User · Answer

It may not be terribly elegant  but it does exactly what OP requested   Note that the ISE messes with StdOut  so there will be no output   In order to see this script work it can t be run within the ISE    stdout  System Console   OpenStandardOutput    strOutput  Enabling feature XYZ       stdout Write   System Text Encoding   ASCII GetBytes  strOutput   0  strOutput Length  Enable-SPFeature     strOutput  Done   stdout Write   System Text Encoding   ASCII GetBytes  strOutput   0  strOutput Length   stdout Close

User · Answer

The answer by shufler is correct  Stated another way  Instead of passing the values to Write-Output using the ARRAY FORM   Write-Output  Parameters are    Year  Month  Day   or the equivalent by multiple calls to Write-Output   Write-Output  Parameters are   Write-Output  Year Write-Output  Month Write-Output  Day Write-Output  Done     concatenate your components into a STRING VARIABLE first    msg  Parameters are   Year  Month  Day  Write-Output  msg   This will prevent the intermediate CRLFs caused by calling Write-Output multiple times  or ARRAY FORM   but of course will not suppress the final CRLF of the Write-Output commandlet  For that  you will have to write your own commandlet  use one of the other convoluted workarounds listed here  or wait until Microsoft decides to support the -NoNewline option for Write-Output   Your desire to provide a textual progress meter to the console  i e          as opposed to writing to a log file  should also be satisfied by using Write-Host  You can accomplish both by collecting the msg text into a variable for writing to the log AND using Write-Host to provide progress to the console  This functionality can be combined into your own commandlet for greatest code reuse

User · Answer

Unfortunately  as noted in several answers and comments  Write-Host can be dangerous and cannot be piped to other processes and Write-Output does not have the -NoNewline flag   But those methods are the   nix  ways to display progression  the  PowerShell  way to do that seems to be Write-Progress  it displays a bar at the top of the PowerShell window with progress information  available from PowerShell 3 0 onward  see manual for details     Total time to sleep  start sleep   120    Time to sleep between each notification  sleep iteration   30  Write-Output    Sleeping  0  seconds       -f   start sleep    for   i 1    i -le   int  start sleep  sleep iteration     i          Start-Sleep -Seconds  sleep iteration     Write-Progress -CurrentOperation   Sleep  0 s  -f   start sleep        0 s      -f   i  sleep iteration      Write-Progress -CurrentOperation   Sleep  0 s  -f   start sleep   -Completed  Done waiting for X to finish    And to take the OP s example     For the file log Write-Output  Enabling feature XYZ     For the operator Write-Progress -CurrentOperation  EnablingFeatureXYZ     Enabling feature XYZ          Enable-SPFeature       For the operator Write-Progress -CurrentOperation  EnablingFeatureXYZ     Enabling feature XYZ     Done       For the log file Write-Output  Feature XYZ enabled

User · Answer

There seems to be no way to do this in PowerShell  All of the previous answers are not correct  because they do not behave the way Write-Output behaves but more like Write-Host which doesn t have this problem anyway   The closes solution seems to use Write-Host with the -NoNewLine parameter  You can not pipe this which is a problem generally  but there is a way to override this function as described in Write-Host   gt  Export to a file  so you can easily make it accept the parameter for an output file  This is still far from a good solution  With Start-Transcript this is more usable  but that cmdlet has problems with native applications   Write-Outputsimply can t do what you need in a general context

User · Answer

A simplification to FrinkTheBrave s response    System IO File   WriteAllText  c  temp myFile txt    myContent

User · Answer

desired o p  Enabling feature XYZ      Done  you can use below command   a    Enabling feature XYZ   Write-output   a      Done   you have to add variable and statement inside quotes  hope this is helpful     Thanks  Techiegal

User · Answer

The problem that I hit was that Write-Output actually linebreaks the output when using using PowerShell v2  at least to stdout  I was trying to write an XML text to stdout without success  because it would be hard wrapped at character 80   The workaround was to use   Console   Out Write  myVeryLongXMLTextBlobLine    This was not an issue in PowerShell v3  Write-Output seems to be working properly there   Depending on how the PowerShell script is invoked  you may need to use   Console   BufferWidth   lt  length of string  e g  10000    before you write to stdout

User · Answer

host UI Write  Enabling feature XYZ          Enable-SPFeature     host UI WriteLine  Done

User · Answer

You simply cannot get PowerShell to omit those pesky newlines    There is no script or cmdlet that does  Of course  Write-Host is absolute nonsense  because you can t redirect pipe from it   Nevertheless  you can write your own EXE file to do it which is what I explained how to do in Stack Overflow question How to output something in PowerShell

User · Answer

Write-Host -NoNewline  Enabling feature XYZ

User · Answer

I cheated  but I believe this is the only answer that addresses every requirement  Namely  this avoids the trailing CRLF  provides a place for the other operation to complete in the meantime  and properly redirects to stdout as necessary    c sharp source      using System  namespace StackOverflow      public class ConsoleOut            public static void Main string   args                   Console Write args 0                       compiler parameters   New-Object System CodeDom Compiler CompilerParameters  compiler parameters GenerateExecutable    true  compiler parameters OutputAssembly    consoleout exe  Add-Type -TypeDefinition  c sharp source -Language CSharp -CompilerParameters  compiler parameters    consoleout exe  Enabling feature XYZ         Write-Output  Done

User · Answer

You can absolutely do this  Write-Output has a flag called  NoEnumerate  that is essentially the same thing

[powershell] How do I output text without a newline in PowerShell?

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