List processes in a Loop

Question

Hello,
I'm looking for a way to list the processes on my client with a delay of 2 seconds for each process. This is the reason why I cannot use Get-Process. Maybe as a do oder foreach loop.
Greetings
Uemit

Answer 1

If you really want to get a process at a time that's doable in the way that jrv said:
Get-Process | ForEach-Object {
#Do whatever you want with $_
Start-Sleep 2
This works because the each object retrieved from Get-Process (in this case the object is the process itself) is immediately passed over the pipeline. After all that's the whole point of the pipeline, that you don't have to store the whole object[] retrieved
by whatever comes before the pipeline into memory.
You can confirm this by doing the following:
function TestFunc
BEGIN {Write-Host "Starting"}
PROCESS {Get-Process Sv*}
END {Write-Host "DONE"}
TestFunc | % {$_; Sleep 1}
When you run it, this is what you get:
Starting
Handles NPM(K) PM(K) WS(K) VM(M) CPU(s) Id ProcessName
385 14 5636 4128 43 852 svchost
138 13 2732 2448 30 4308 svchost
DONE
I removed a lot of the processes to trim the output down. Each of the processes is presented with a 1 second delay in between them and the DONE is only printed at the very end.
You do need to keep a couple of things in mind though... You can only use this in a pipeline. A foreach loop would not work, as demonstrated here:
function TestFunc
BEGIN {Write-Host "Starting"}
PROCESS {Get-Process sv*}
END {Write-Host "DONE"}
foreach ($i in TestFunc)
$i
Start-Sleep 1
This would output the following:
Starting
DONE
Handles NPM(K) PM(K) WS(K) VM(M) CPU(s) Id ProcessName
385 14 5636 4128 43 852 svchost
138 13 2732 2448 30 4308 svchost
You can see that the end block got executed before we started seeing our objects come through, which means at that stage we're already processing an array of objects instead of dealing with each one individually.
Also, even if using the pipeline, you cannot use CmdLets that must have a full collection of objects before being able to run themselves. i.e.:
Get-Process | Sort-Object Handles | % {$_; Start-Sleep 1}
Would again return:
Starting
DONE
Handles NPM(K) PM(K) WS(K) VM(M) CPU(s) Id ProcessName
385 14 5636 4128 43 852 svchost
138 13 2732 2448 30 4308 svchost
The reason for that is because the Sort-Object needs to first collect all of the objects from the previous CmdLet before it can start a sort and it will not relinquish any objects to the next command in the pipeline until it's completed its execution.
Hope this helps.