At its core, MSH is an object pipeline. Unix, of course, invented the pipelining concept. But in Unix-like systems -- including Linux and OS X -- the data that’s passed from one command to the next is weakly structured ASCII text. When you’ve got smart, self-describing objects flowing through that pipeline, it’s a whole new ball game.

Here’s the drill with MSH. You start by typing the command get-process. As does Unix’s ps command, get-process prints a bunch of process statistics on the console. But under the covers, it emits a sequence of System.Diagnostics.Process objects.

MSH composition capabilities make some tasks that normally would take several lines of code in a scripting language into one-liners. Trim-SparseText is a good example; it's a simple filter that cleans up incoming input strings for easier parsing later. It removes all leading or trailing whitespace, and then only emits the text if it is longer than 0 length.

  filter Trim-SparseText{$_ = $_.Trim();if($_){$_;} }