How to Splat a Value with Multiple Arguments

Tonight I came upon a little different problem than usual. Normally about this time of the night (9:00 PM in a different time zone than normal) I begin making all kinds of interesting logic errors. Not tonight. This evening I needed to splat a value with multiple arguments. Yes, I know. When I’m on these long business trips I can be absolutely boring. I’m back home again in Indiana, and it is not the interesting part of the state. That would be Brown County State Park. No wilderness hiking this week. Back on topic, splatting allows you to provide a list of parameters and values to a PowerShell cmdlet in an organized way that prevents horizontal scrolling. Best of all, no use of the back tick character.

In this example, I am looking at splatting the Property parameter of Get-CIMInstance here is the help file for this parameter.

PS C:\> Get-help Get-CimInstance -Parameter Property

-Property <String[]>

Specifies a set of instance properties to retrieve.

Use this parameter when you need to reduce the size of the object returned, either in memory or over the network.

The object returned always has key properties populated, irrespective of the set of properties listed by the

Property parameter. Other properties of the class are present but they are not populated.

Required? false

Position? named

Default value

Accept pipeline input? True (ByPropertyName)

Accept wildcard characters? false

We can see that this property accepts multiple values. Take a look at –Property <String[ ]>. Those [ ] square brackets tells us that we can provide multiple values separated by commas. I’ve never actually tried to splat more than 1 value per parameter so this took a few attempts to get it right. Here we go!

$Splat = @{

'ClassName' = 'Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration'

'Property' = ‘Description’, ‘IPAddress’, ‘IPSubnet’

}

Get-CimInstance @Splat

When you need to splat a parameter with multiple arguments, just make sure that each argument is encapsulated in its’ own set of quotes, then separate with a comma. If you need to, press enter after a comma and add more arguments on the next line. Again, a great way to avoid horizontal scrolling.

Time for bed. I’ve got to teach Windows 8.1 in the morning. Happy scripting!!!

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