PowerShell Core 6.0 is here and with it are a ton of new features. I’ve been going through some of the release notes and Github pages trying to find cool stuff to play with. On the docket for today is backgrounding the pipeline.

The Good Stuff: Check out background pipes using & in PowerShell 6.0.

Background jobs are one of the ways we can execute long running tasks in PowerShell. If you never played with PowerShell jobs, I recommend you go read PowerShell background job basics by Timothy Warner as a primer. While the underlying job structure and cmdlets still work in version 6 we got a new way to launch jobs.

Traditionally to start a job we would need to use the Start-Job cmdlet with a scriptblock.

Start-Job -ScriptBlock { Get-Service }

Now we can kick off a job using the & character at the end of our pipeline.

 Get-Service &

Regardless of the syntax, the output of the above commands is a job object. What takes the new syntax to the next level for me, is how the new way handles variables. When you use the & syntax any variables in your session automatically get copied into the job. Consider the below examples.

Traditional way

$name = 'David'
$job = Start-Job -ScriptBlock {Write-Output "Hello $name"}
$job | Receive-Job -Wait

Output:

Hello

New Way

$name = 'David'
$job = Write-Output "Hello $name" &
$job | Receive-Job -Wait

Output

Hello David

The next enhancement provided by the & syntax is how it handles the working directory of the job. When you launch a job using the traditional syntax, the job always starts in your user home directory. Using the & will start the job in your current directory. Let’s take a look at this behavior. I’m going to run all commands from my Github root folder, C:\github.

Traditional way

$job = Start-Job -ScriptBlock {Get-Location}
$job | Receive-Job -Wait

Output:

Path
----
C:\Users\David\Documents

New Way

$job = Get-Location &
$job | Receive-Job -Wait

Output

Path
----
C:\github

Pretty cool right? Got any neat uses for background jobs or other new features you want to talk about? Leave a comment and let us know.