PowerShell text output vs. console output

loggingpowershell

I'm building a script to monitor my event logs. This command gathers only "Error" and "Warning" messages and places them into the $entries array.

$entries = $log.Entries |
? {$_.TimeWritten -gt ($(Get-Date).AddDays(-2)) -and `
(($_.EntryType -like "Error") -or `
($_.EntryType -like "Warning"))} |
Format-Table -wrap

If I output $entries in the console, it displays what I want – the log entries – but if I pipe this out to a text file (Add-Content $output $entries) I get the .NET class name only (System.Diagnostics.EventLogEntry). I have also tried foreach ($entry in $entries) with similar results.

What's the basic PowerShell principle I'm missing here?

Best Answer

Basically - the add-content/set-content command just do a ToString() on whatever you pass to it. For many .NET objects, that is just the class name.

If you do:
out-string -inputobject $entries | add-content "yourfile.txt"

That should properly convert to a string and output it to your text file.

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