scripting - How to count objects in PowerShell?

Question

As I'm reading in the PowerShell user guide, one of the core PowerShell concepts is that commands accept and return objects instead of text. So for example, running get-alias returns me a number of System.Management.Automation.AliasInfo objects:

PS Z:> get-alias

CommandType     Name                                             Definition
-----------     ----                                             ----------
Alias           %                                                ForEach-Object
Alias           ?                                                Where-Object
Alias           ac                                               Add-Content
Alias           asnp                                             Add-PSSnapIn
Alias           cat                                              Get-Content
Alias           cd                                               Set-Location
Alias           chdir                                            Set-Location
...

Now, how do I get the count of these objects?

Answer 1

This will get you count:

get-alias | measure

You can work with the result as with object:

$m = get-alias | measure
$m.Count

And if you would like to have aliases in some variable also, you can use Tee-Object:

$m = get-alias | tee -Variable aliases | measure
$m.Count
$aliases

Some more info on Measure-Object cmdlet is on Technet.

Do not confuse it with Measure-Command cmdlet which is for time measuring. (again on Technet)