Using Select-Object to Get Only Value in PowerShell

To get only the property values without any additional object information, you can use the -ExpandProperty parameter with the Select-Object cmdlet.

The following methods show how you retrieve only the property values in the PowerShell.

Method 1: Using the Select-Object -ExpandProperty

Get-Process | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Name -First 5

This example will return only the property values for the first 5 processes in Windows.

Method 2: Using the ForEach-Object

# Create an object with properties
$object = [PSCustomObject]@{
    Property1 = "C#"
    Property2 = "PowerShell"
}

# Retrieve only the value of Property1
$propertyValue = $object | ForEach-Object { $_.Property1 }

$propertyValue

This example will return the value of the specified property without any additional object information.

The following examples show how you can use these methods.

Use the Select-Object -ExpandProperty to Get Only Property Value

You can use the -ExpandProperty parameter of the Select-Object command to retrieve the values of the specified property.

# Get the first 5 process and their values only
$processList = Get-Process | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Name -First 5

# Output the process values
Write-Output $processList

Output:

In this example, we define the $processList variable. The Get-Process cmdlet retrieves the list of all processes and pipes them to the Select-Object cmdlet. It then uses the -ExpandProperty parameter to get only values of the process name and stores them in the $processList.

Finally, we use the Write-Output cmdlet to output the values of the specified property stored in the $processList.

The output shows it lists the property values without a header.

Using the ForEach-Object to Get Only Property Value

You can use the ForEach-Object loop to iterate through the selected objects and extract the specified property values.

# Create an object with properties

$object = [PSCustomObject]@{
Property1 = "PowerShell"
Property2 = "C#"
}

# Retrieve only the value of Property1
$propertyValue = $object | ForEach-Object { $_.Property1 }

Write-Host $propertyValue

Output:

In this example, we created an object with properties using [PSCustomObject].

We then pipe the object to the ForEach-Object to retrieve the value of the property Property1 and assign it to the $propertyValue variable.

Finally, we use the Write-Host cmdlet to output the property value.

Conclusion

I hope the above article on retrieving only property values using the Select-Object cmdlet -ExpandProperty parameter in PowerShell is helpful to you.

You can find more topics about Active Directory tools and PowerShell basics on the ActiveDirectoryTools home page.