PowerShell Loops

Each scripting language has several different methods of applying the loop. PowerShell also support some universal loop like:

The simplest and most useful loop is foreach. This loop performs an operation for each input objects. For example:

$array = 1,2,3,4,5
$array | ForEach {Write-Host $_}

ForEach ($value in $array) {Write-Host $value}

For loop is a standard loop to execute a specific number of times.

For ($i=1; $i -lt 5; $i++) {Write-Host $i}

Next loop is while. The While statement performs an operation until the condition is true.

$i = 1
While($i -lt 5) {Write-Host $i; $i++}

While loop can be used in several different variants: do while and do until.

Do while executes as long as the condition is true but the first time it always executes.

$i = 1
do {Write-Host $i; $i++}
while ($i -lt 5)

Do until works almost the same as do while but it executes until the condition is not true.

$i = 1
do {Write-Host $i; $i++}
until ($i -gt 5)

For a complete set of examples, scenarios and commentary regarding loops in PowerShell, please visit this site or use cmdlet Get-Help:

See Also