Loops

published: February 5, 2019 author: Tinu tags: PowerShell categories: PowerShell-Basic

Table of Contents
For-Loop
While-Loop
Do-While-Loop
Do-Until-Loop
ForEach-Loop
ForEach-Object-Loop
Timer-Loop
See also

For-Loop

This example initializes the loop counter $i with the value 0. It increments the counter by one with each iteration until it reaches 5, which is the condition that quits the loop.

Initialize: $i = 0, Increment: $i++, Condition: $i -lt 5

for ($i = 0; $i -lt 5; $i++){
    Write-Host "Loop $($i), wait 2 Seconds"
    Start-Sleep -Seconds 2
}
$i = $null

While-Loop

It is called a pretest ($i -lt 5) loop because the instructions in the loop body are not executed, even once, if the loop condition doesn’t match.

Initialize: $i = 0, Increment: $i++, Condition: $i -lt 5

$i = 0
while ($i -lt 5) {
    Write-Host "Loop $($i), wait 2 Seconds"
    Start-Sleep -Seconds 2
    $i++
}

Do-While-Loop

From a syntactical point of view, do-while and do-until are identical. The difference is logical in nature.

do-while continues to run as long as the condition is true and terminates when the condition is no longer fulfilled.

do {
    $sc = Get-Service MyService
    if($sc.Status -notmatch 'Running'){
        Start-Service MyService
        Start-Sleep -Seconds 2
        $sc = Get-Service MyService
    }
}
while ($sc.Status -match 'Stop') ## if condition is true, go to the next loop

Do-Until-Loop

do-until works the other way around: it quits when the condition takes the value TRUE.

$i = 0
do {
    Restart-Computer MyServer
    Start-Sleep -Seconds 2
    $PsNetPing = Test-PsNetPing MyServer
    $i++
    if($i -gt 10){
        break
    }
}
until ($PsNetPing.IcmpSucceeded) ## if condition is true, exit the loop
if($i -gt 10){
    Write-Host "Break loop, could not start MyServer within $(2*10) seconds"
}else{
    Write-Host "MyServer is online"
}

ForEach-Loop

The conventional foreach loop is significantly faster than the ForEach-Object loop.

foreach($item in $collection) {
    Write-Host "Loop $($item), wait 2 Seconds"
    Start-Sleep -Seconds 2
}

ForEach-Object-Loop

Get-ADUser -Filter * | ForEach-Object {
    Write-Host $_
}

Timer-Loop

A short timer loop for one minute.

1..60 | foreach {write-host '.' -nonewline;sleep -Seconds 1}

Tinus EngOps Wiki

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