PowerShell cmdlets return (active) objects in the same process space as the hosting process (usually the shell). As such they can expose expensive-to-compute pr

PowerShell cmdlets return (active) objects in the same process space as the hosting process (usually the shell). As such they can expose expensive-to-compute properties as late-evaluated properties that are only evaluated if and when they are invoked later. Take for instance Get-Process: $p = ps powershell (ps is an alias for Get-Process). Now $p is the process information onject about the PowerShell process itself. Type $p And PowerShell will respond with Handles NPM(K) PM(K) WS(K) VM(M) CPU(s) Id ProcessName ------- ------ ----- ----- ----- ------ -- ----------- 359 24 57096 61972 611 2,20 9608 powershell If you request the content of $p at some later point in time, you will notice how the CPU has increased, for instance. The point is that a lot of the properties are computed when read, and hence do not incur overhead in the pipeline.