PowerShell Progress Meter

In many of my past PowerShell scripts, I've included my own home-spun progress report in the results window. I like that a lot, but my mind was blown when I noticed that there is a "Write-Process" cmdlet...with some re-tweaking I made it rock and much more efficient.

So the situation where you would want to use this is if you are looping over a large dataset and it takes a while to bring back results (I often will use PowerShell to hit all the servers I control, get some information about them and return it to me (backup status, if they are VM's, configuration info, etc). It can take 20+ minutes to get to all the servers and it is nice to know how far along the process is; thats where this comes in handy.

Some things to keep in mind...You need to have some resultset to work with, it doesn't have to be a query, but it does have to be some kind of System.Array. After you generate the Array, run this bit of code...I'm calling my array "results":

<################################
 ##  SETUP PROGRESS VARIABLES  ##
 ################################>
$ResultsLen = $results.Length
$LastPercentComplete = 0
[datetime]$DateStart = Get-Date -format G

This sets up some of the variables we will need inside the progress meter. Next, just after you issue your "foreach ($result in $results) {" You run the following code:

<##########################
 ##  RUN PROGRESS METER  ##
 ##########################>
foreach ($result in $results) 
{
 $currentRow++
 $PercentComplete = [math]::floor(($CurrentRow/$ResultsLen)*100)
 [datetime]$DateNow = Get-Date -format G
 $diff = $DateNow-$DateStart
 $DiffSeconds = $diff.TotalSeconds
 $SecondsPerRecord = $DiffSeconds/$currentRow
 $RemainingSeconds = $SecondsPerRecord*($ResultsLen-$currentRow)
 $SecondsPerRecord = [Math]::Round($SecondsPerRecord,2)
 
 Write-Progress -Activity "Investigating Servers..." `
  -PercentComplete $PercentComplete `
  -SecondsRemaining $RemainingSeconds `
  -CurrentOperation "Current Row: $currentRow / $ResultsLen.   Seconds/Record: $SecondsPerRecord   Run Time (seconds): $DiffSeconds" `
  -Status "Please wait."

 Remove-Variable DateNow
 Remove-Variable DiffSeconds
 Remove-Variable SecondsPerRecord
 Remove-Variable RemainingSeconds
}

You don't need to remove your variables, I just like to do it to clean up my code, I do this at the bottom of the script:

Remove-Variable ResultsLen
Remove-Variable currentRow
Remove-Variable LastPercentComplete
Remove-Variable DateStart

Want to see it in action? Take my script and add this to the top of it (creates an array with 10000 items, which should keep the status bar up long enough for you to see):
$results = 1..10000

This looks awesome in PowerGUI, which is what I use for PowerShell Development, it looks a bit funky in the native PS window, but good enough to get you the idea. If you aren't using PowerGUI, give it a shot, it's free. http://www.powergui.org

As always, please leave comments below if you find this useful or have other suggestions. It's nice to know people read these posts.