PowerShell comes with a number of looping constructs. These looping constructs cannot stream, so you cannot pipe the results to other cmdlets and use the pipeline real-time benefits. Instead, you must store all data in variables first, and only when the loop is completed can you pipe the variable to someone else.
While you can resort to ForEach-Object to replace classic foreach and for loops, it slows down code and is no solution for while and do loops.
Here is an easy trick how you can enable fast streaming for any loop. Let’s take this rather stupid loop to play with:
# stupid sample using a do loop # a more realistic use case could be a database query do { $val = Get-Random -Minimum 0 -Maximum 10 $val } while ($val -ne 6)
It loops until the random number 6 is drawn. You’ll see that you cannot pipe the results in real-time, so you have to resort to something like this to sort the results or do other things with them:
$all = do { $val = Get-Random -Minimum 0 -Maximum 10 $val } while ($val -ne 6) $all | Out-GridView
By enclosing the loop into a script block, you get real-time streaming: less memory consumption, immediate results:
& { do { $val = Get-Random -Minimum 0 -Maximum 10 $val } while ($val -ne 6) } | Out-GridView
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