How do I output text without a newline in PowerShell?

Question

I want my PowerShell script to print something like this:

Enabling feature XYZ......Done

The script looks something like this:

Write-Output "Enabling feature XYZ......."
Enable-SPFeature...
Write-Output "Done"

But Write-Output always prints a new-line at the end so my output isn't on one line. Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

Write-Host -NoNewline "Enabling feature XYZ......."

Answer 2

Unfortunately, as noted in several answers and comments, Write-Host can be dangerous and cannot be piped to other processes and Write-Output does not have the -NoNewline flag.

But those methods are the "*nix" ways to display progression, the "PowerShell" way to do that seems to be Write-Progress: it displays a bar at the top of the PowerShell window with progress information, available from PowerShell 3.0 onward, see manual for details.

# Total time to sleep
$start_sleep = 120

# Time to sleep between each notification
$sleep_iteration = 30

Write-Output ( "Sleeping {0} seconds ... " -f ($start_sleep) )
for ($i=1 ; $i -le ([int]$start_sleep/$sleep_iteration) ; $i++) {
    Start-Sleep -Seconds $sleep_iteration
    Write-Progress -CurrentOperation ("Sleep {0}s" -f ($start_sleep)) ( " {0}s ..." -f ($i*$sleep_iteration) )
}
Write-Progress -CurrentOperation ("Sleep {0}s" -f ($start_sleep)) -Completed "Done waiting for X to finish"

And to take the OP's example:

# For the file log
Write-Output "Enabling feature XYZ"

# For the operator
Write-Progress -CurrentOperation "EnablingFeatureXYZ" ( "Enabling feature XYZ ... " )

Enable-SPFeature...

# For the operator
Write-Progress -CurrentOperation "EnablingFeatureXYZ" ( "Enabling feature XYZ ... Done" )

# For the log file
Write-Output "Feature XYZ enabled"

Answer 3

While it may not work in your case (since you're providing informative output to the user), create a string that you can use to append output. When it's time to output it, just output the string.

Ignoring of course that this example is silly in your case but useful in concept:

$output = "Enabling feature XYZ......."
Enable-SPFeature...
$output += "Done"
Write-Output $output

Displays:

Enabling feature XYZ.......Done

Answer 4

Yes, as other answers have states, it cannot be done with Write-Output. Where PowerShell fails, turn to .NET, there are even a couple of .NET answers here but they are more complex than they need to be.

Just use:

[Console]::Write("Enabling feature XYZ.......")
Enable-SPFeature...
Write-Output "Done"

It is not purest PowerShell, but it works.

Answer 5

To write to a file you can use a byte array. The following example creates an empty ZIP file, which you can add files to:

[Byte[]] $zipHeader = 80, 75, 5, 6, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
[System.IO.File]::WriteAllBytes("C:\My.zip", $zipHeader)

Or use:

[Byte[]] $text = [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.getBytes("Enabling feature XYZ.......")
[System.IO.File]::WriteAllBytes("C:\My.zip", $text)

Answer 6

There seems to be no way to do this in PowerShell. All of the previous answers are not correct, because they do not behave the way Write-Output behaves but more like Write-Host which doesn't have this problem anyway.

The closes solution seems to use Write-Host with the -NoNewLine parameter. You can not pipe this which is a problem generally, but there is a way to override this function as described in Write-Host => Export to a file, so you can easily make it accept the parameter for an output file. This is still far from a good solution. With Start-Transcript this is more usable, but that cmdlet has problems with native applications.

Write-Outputsimply can't do what you need in a general context.

EDIT 2023:

You can for craziness of it do something like this:

function log ($msg, [switch] $NoNewLine)
{
    $script:_msg+=$msg

    if ($NoNewLine)
    {
        Write-Host -NoNewline $msg
    }
    else
    {
        Write-Host $msg
        $script:_msg >> output.txt
        $script:_msg = ''
    }
}

Test:

log 'enabling feature xyx ' -NoNewLine; 1..3 | % { sleep 1; log . -NoNewLine }; log ' ok'; cat output.txt`
> enabling feature xyx ... ok

Answer 7

The problem that I hit was that Write-Output actually linebreaks the output when using using PowerShell v2, at least to stdout. I was trying to write an XML text to stdout without success, because it would be hard wrapped at character 80.

The workaround was to use

[Console]::Out.Write($myVeryLongXMLTextBlobLine)

This was not an issue in PowerShell v3. Write-Output seems to be working properly there.

Depending on how the PowerShell script is invoked, you may need to use

[Console]::BufferWidth =< length of string, e.g. 10000)

before you write to stdout.

Answer 8

I cheated, but I believe this is the only answer that addresses every requirement. Namely, this avoids the trailing CRLF, provides a place for the other operation to complete in the meantime, and properly redirects to stdout as necessary.

$c_sharp_source = @"
using System;
namespace StackOverflow
{
   public class ConsoleOut
   {
      public static void Main(string[] args)
      {
         Console.Write(args[0]);
      }
   }
}
"@
$compiler_parameters = New-Object System.CodeDom.Compiler.CompilerParameters
$compiler_parameters.GenerateExecutable = $true
$compiler_parameters.OutputAssembly = "consoleout.exe"
Add-Type -TypeDefinition $c_sharp_source -Language CSharp -CompilerParameters $compiler_parameters

.\consoleout.exe "Enabling feature XYZ......."
Write-Output 'Done.'

Answer 9

The answer by shufler is correct. Stated another way: Instead of passing the values to Write-Output using the ARRAY FORM,

Write-Output "Parameters are:" $Year $Month $Day

or the equivalent by multiple calls to Write-Output,

Write-Output "Parameters are:"
Write-Output $Year
Write-Output $Month
Write-Output $Day
Write-Output "Done."

concatenate your components into a STRING VARIABLE first:

$msg="Parameters are: $Year $Month $Day"
Write-Output $msg

This will prevent the intermediate CRLFs caused by calling Write-Output multiple times (or ARRAY FORM), but of course will not suppress the final CRLF of the Write-Output cmdlet. For that, you will have to write your own cmdlet, use one of the other convoluted workarounds listed here, or wait until Microsoft decides to support the -NoNewline option for Write-Output.

Your desire to provide a textual progress meter to the console (i.e., "....") as opposed to writing to a log file, should also be satisfied by using Write-Host. You can accomplish both by collecting the message text into a variable for writing to the log and using Write-Host to provide progress to the console. This functionality can be combined into your own CPU for greatest code reuse.

Answer 10

The following will place the cursor back at beginning of the previous row. It's up to you to place it in the right horizontal position (using $pos.X to move it sideways):

$pos = $host.ui.RawUI.get_cursorPosition()
$pos.Y -= 1
$host.UI.RawUI.set_cursorPosition($Pos)

Your current output is 27 spaces over, so $pos.X = 27 might work.

Answer 11

You simply cannot get PowerShell to omit those pesky newlines... There is no script or cmdlet that does. Of course, Write-Host is absolute nonsense, because you can't redirect/pipe from it!

Nevertheless, you can write your own EXE file to do it which is what I explained how to do in Stack Overflow question How to output something in PowerShell.

Answer 12

Write-Host is terrible, a destroyer of worlds, yet you can use it just to display progress to a user whilst using Write-Output to log (not that the OP asked for logging).

Write-Output "Enabling feature XYZ" | Out-File "log.txt" # Pipe to log file
Write-Host -NoNewLine "Enabling feature XYZ......."
$result = Enable-SPFeature
$result | Out-File "log.txt"
# You could try{}catch{} an exception on Enable-SPFeature depending on what it's doing
if ($result -ne $null) {
    Write-Host "complete"
} else {
    Write-Host "failed"
}

Answer 13

A simplification to FrinkTheBrave's response:

[System.IO.File]::WriteAllText("c:\temp\myFile.txt", $myContent)

Answer 14

Personally, I just use something like this:

write "the user $($user.firstname) is online"

If I don't use $(), only $user is interpreted, not $user.firstname.

Answer 15

$host.UI.Write('Enabling feature XYZ.......')
Enable-SPFeature...
$host.UI.WriteLine('Done')

Answer 16

I'm not an expert by any means, but why not this:

Write-Output "hello" | ForEach-Object {  $PSItem.Trim() } | Do-Whatever

This maintains the pipeline semantics, but it just trims the new line characters before passing it on down the pipeline to whatever you need to do next. If that is writing to a file, so be it. If that is writing to the host, you can do that, but if you do write it to the host, remember to use | Write-Host -NoNewline

As per my comment below: "I see why my answer won't work.. PowerShell inevitable appends a new line character as part of its piping semantics when piping to external programs. See this: github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/issues/5974. Therefore, when I pass the trimmed text down the pipeline, the new line character will reappear in the input."

Answer 17

It may not be terribly elegant, but it does exactly what the OP requested. Note that the ISE messes with standard output, so there will not be any output. In order to see this script work, it can't be run within the ISE.

$stdout=[System.Console]::OpenStandardOutput()
$strOutput="Enabling feature XYZ... "
$stdout.Write(([System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetBytes($strOutput)),0,$strOutput.Length)
Enable-SPFeature...
$strOutput="Done"
$stdout.Write(([System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetBytes($strOutput)),0,$strOutput.Length)
$stdout.Close()

Answer 18

The simplest way with in-line concatenation. And while moving across to 'Write-Output' instead; for example., two tab characters (string) and then a literal/verbatim (string):

Write-Output ("`t`t" + '${devArg}')

Answer 19

Desired output:

Enabling feature XYZ......Done

You can use the below command

$a = "Enabling feature XYZ"

Write-output "$a......Done"

You have to add a variable and a statement inside quotes.

Answer 20

From the link in the comments, that answer includes:

Write-Output "Some text $( $var.Name )"

which worked very well for me. The $( ) is not redundant if you need to ExpandProperty to get the individual value of Name, otherwise my output was this instead of the resolved value:

@{Name=Name; Address=Address; City=City}.Name

Answer 21

You can absolutely do this. Write-Output has a flag called "NoEnumerate" that is essentially the same thing.