Difference Between PowerCLI Commands in Script and Command Line

[rcPowercliUser]

If from the PowerShell I type Get-VM the VMs appear in a formated table.

When I have a PowerShell script that called the same command the details of the VMs are presented sequentially.

Can someone please explain this? Is there some form of default view when commands are executed in the power shell.

I have a script from which I want to list the names of all the VMs in a table e.g.

Name     VMHost

VM1       host1

VM2       host2

When I execute "Get-VM | Select Name, VMHost " in my script I get

Name: VM1

Host:   host1

Nmae: VM2

Host:   host2

As I have a large number of VMs this becomes very unreadable.

Any help would be gratefully appreciated.

[LucD]

That could be due to the linelength PS thinks you have and the length of the properties.

Try something like this

Get-VM | Select Name, VMHost | ft -Autosize

Check what the current linelength is with

$Host.ui.rawui.WindowSize.width

You can check what the maxima are with

$host.ui.rawui.MaxWindowSize

[rcPowercliUser]

Thanks for this.

I can use fl and ft to switch the format from list to table using the power shell command line. e.g.

Get-VM | Select Name, VMHost | ft and

Get-VM | Select Name, VMHost | fl

When I enter either of these lines in to a script and run it (including ft -AutoSize) I get the following error:

"Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.Internal.Format.FormatStartData" is not valid or not
in the correct sequence. This is likely caused by a user-specified "format-table" command which is conflicting with th
e default formatting.
    + CategoryInfo          : InvalidData: (:) [out-lineoutput], InvalidOperationException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : ConsoleLineOutputOutOfSequencePacket,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.OutLineOutputCommand

Having googled this I found the following post http://communities.vmware.com/message/1665165

This indicates it is a bug and can be fixed with the following

Get-VM | Select Name, VMHost | ft | out-default

Will try it now....

Fixed. Thanks for the help

[LucD]

That is indeed an annoying bug 😞