Introduction to splatting

Splatting is a way of defining the parameters of a command before calling it. This is an important and often underrated technique that the PowerShell team added in PowerShell 2.

Splatting is often used to solve three potential problems in a script:

• Long lines caused by commands that need many parameters
• Conditional use of parameters
• Repetition of parameters across several commands

Individual parameters are written in a hashtable (@{}), and then the @ symbol is used to tell PowerShell that the content of the hashtable should be read as parameters.

This example supplies the Name parameter for the Get-Process command, and is normally written as Get-Process -Name explorer:

$getProcess = @{
    Name = 'explorer'
}
Get-Process @getProcess

In this example, getProcess is used as the name of the variable for the hashtable. The name is arbitrary; any variable name can be used.

Splatting can be used...