Last week I posted about a request to get a list of services. The first problem I ran into was expanding the column width, now I need to get the output off my screen and into a file to send the requestor. The cmdlet out-file is perfect for this and it’s pretty simple.

Get-Service | Where-Object {$_.Status -eq "Running"} | `
    Format-Table -AutoSize | Out-File -FilePath C:\temp\Services.txt

Fantastic! But what if I want a csv (comma delimited) format? In that case I can use Export-Csv.

This did take me a bit of work to figure out. I couldn’t just replace Out-File with Export-Csv. After a bunch of messing around it turned out that Format-Table, that I’d used to avoid data truncation was causing me a problem. Once I took that out it worked great.

Get-Service | Where-Object {$_.Status -eq "Running"} | `
    Export-Csv -Path C:\temp\Services.csv 

Interestingly it turns out that by using Export-Csv I no longer have a truncation issue, and I have a lot more columns. Some of which could be handy, but in this case I only wanted the three that I started with. So we throw in a Select-Object to specify the columns we want.

Get-Service | Where-Object {$_.Status -eq "Running"} | `
    Select-Object Status, Name, DisplayName | `
    Export-Csv -Path C:\temp\Services.csv

And there we go! Another useful feature of Export-Csv is that you can change the delimiter (by default the comma) to something else by just using the -Delimiter parameter. For example this gives us a pipe delimited file.

Get-Service | Where-Object {$_.Status -eq "Running"} | `
    Select-Object Status, Name, DisplayName | `
    Export-Csv -Path C:\temp\Services.csv -Delimiter '|'