This is a core PowerShell design feature and is not likely to be changed as would be a major breaking change due to the way that the pipeline works and is designed.

an example to understand how the pipeline is used in Powershell would be like

 Get-ChildItem C:\scripts\ -Recurse | Where-Object {$_.Name -like "*.ps*1"} | Group-object -Property Extension | Select-Object Count,Name

To break this down we are getting all the items in the C:\Scripts\ folder and recursive folders and then with the collection of objects that would output we pass this to Where-Object using the Pipeline to then only return files that have a ps*1 extension and then with the collection of objects that would output this is then passed again using the pipeline to Group-Object where we get an output based on the grouping of the items based on the file extension and the we pipe this to Select-Object and tell it that we want only the Count and Name returned from that collection

The Output we would get from would get something similar to the below

Count Name 
----- ---- 
   76 .ps1 
    1 .psm1

Happy to answer any other questions on the PowerShell Pipeline if you have them?

Hi!

@kilasuit, I could be off base, but IIRC commands with a proper process block implementation will stream their output, allowing something akin to @ilius' example.

I'm guessing there might be some odd behavior if you mix and match output from *nix tools and PowerShell tools, and this would be expected in cases where you have a blocking command (e.g. you need all items to sort them).

Cheers!

@RamblingCookieMonster is correct. Powershell will stream objects down the pipe when it can. A good common example would be to tail a log file and pipe to a search string.

Get-Content -Path $path -Tail | Select-String 'Error'

But there are other commands that will block the pipe and wait for all the objects before continuing. Sort-Object is an obvious example.

I can't see how this breaks compatibility
If a command (like ``Sort-ObjectorSelect-Object`) needs the whole input to process, it can wait for the whole input itself, that's up to the second command (receiver), that does not prevent the first command (sender) or the Shell to send it's output.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_(Unix)

Closing as this is a duplicate, see #559. It is fixable, but a bit tricky.