I need to process large numbers in a PowerShell FOREACH loop. I receive the following exception:
Cannot convert value "60000000000" to type "System.Int32"
[long]$LargeNumber = 60000000000
foreach ($i in 1..$LargeNumber) {
$i
}
what am I doing wrong?
It appears as though there is a limitation on powershell's range operator (..) that limits the input arguments to Int32. I can't find official documentation, but according to this page:
2 Restrictions and a Caveat There are only two basic restrictions on range use. The first restriction is that the numbers in the range must be between -2,147,483,648 and 2,147,483,647, inclusive; this limit is because PowerShell's range operator changes the values into 32-bit .NET integers, which can only take on these values. The second limit is that an individual range can contain no more than 50,001 items.
This seems to work. But I didn't wait for it to finish. 6 million with measure-command took 29 seconds.
measure-command { for($i = 0; $i -le 6000000; $i++) { $i } }
Seconds : 29
Maybe 3 days for 60 billion loops?
$LargeNumber = 60000000000
for($i = 0; $i -le $largenumber; $i++) { $i }
It's probably not practical to create a 60 billion array of 8 byte integers with the range operator (450 gigs?). Watch Powershell's Working Set memory go up to 259.61 megs with 1..6million. I almost crashed my computer with higher amounts. I'm on a mac with ps 6.
get-process pwsh
NPM(K) PM(M) WS(M) CPU(s) Id SI ProcessName
------ ----- ----- ------ -- -- -----------
0 0.00 77.98 3,212.20 39615 …02 pwsh
$a = 1..6000000
get-process pwsh
NPM(K) PM(M) WS(M) CPU(s) Id SI ProcessName
------ ----- ----- ------ -- -- -----------
0 0.00 259.61 3,275.24 39615 …02 pwsh
Just for completion. I tweaked the code like below to make it work.
[long]$LargeNumber = 60000000000
[long]$i = 0
while (1 -eq 1) {
$i
if ($i -gt $LargeNumber) {
break
}
$i++
}
forloop would work better? Something likefor ($i = 1; $i -le $LargeNumber; $i++)