Sending Output to a Text File

Many times you'll want the output of the PowerShell command to be written to a file instead of the screen. This can be especially useful when you're creating documentation. While learning, you may want to send the output of some of these commands so you can read them later. There are two ways to do this.

The first is the same method used with the command prompt using the redirection symbol (>). For example, if you want to send a list of all aliases to a text file named PSAlias.txt and then open the text file, you could use these commands:

Get-Alias > PSAlias.txt
Notepad PSAlias.txt

PowerShell also uses the Out-File cmdlet to send the output to a file. If you wanted to send a listing of services and their current status to a file, you could use the Get-Service cmdlet and the Out-File cmdlet in the same line.

Just as pipelining can be used at the command line, it can be used in PowerShell. When you want the output of one PowerShell command to be used as the input to another command on the same line, you would separate the commands with the pipe symbol (|), which is typically Shift+backslash (\) on most keyboards. The following shows how this is done:

Get-Service | Out-File Service.txt
Notepad Service.txt

Of course, if you wanted to save the file to a different location, you could include the full path. For example, you could save the file in the Data folder on the C: drive with this command: