Display the Properties of an Item As a List in Windows PowerShell

Problem

You have an item (for example, an error record, directory item, or .NET object), and you want to display detailed information about that object in a list format.

Solution

To display detailed information about an item, pass that item to the FormatList cmdlet. For example, to display an error in list format, type the commands:

$currentError = $error[0] $currentError | FormatList Force

Discussion

The FormatList cmdlet is one of the three PowerShell formatting cmdlets. These cmdlets include FormatTable, FormatList, and FormatWide. The FormatList cmdlet takes input and displays information about that input as a list. By default, PowerShell takes the list of properties to display from the *.format.ps1xml files in PowerShell’s installation directory. To display all properties of the item, type FormatList *. Sometimes, you might type FormatList * but still not get a list of the item’s properties. This happens when the item is defined in the *.format.ps1xml files, but does not define anything to be displayed for the list command. In that case, type