For whatever reason, I had a really difficult time wrapping my head around the usage of Write-Progress. The basic usage is off-course quite easy:

Write-Progress -Activity "Something" -Status "Something else" -CurrentOperation "thinking" -PercentComplete 30

This will show a quick progress bar stating that “Something” is going on, the status is “Something else” and it has gotten to 30%. However, when I wanted to use Write-Progress in a large script I quickly got confused when I looked at some of the examples out there. I mean, look at this for example:

$wmiQuery = "Select name from win32_service where state = 'running'"
$colItems = Get-WmiObject -Query $wmiQuery
For($i = 1; $i -le $colItems.count; $i++)
{ Write-Progress -Activity "Gathering Services" -status "Found Service $i" `
-percentComplete ($i / $colItems.count*100)}
$colItems | Select name

I’m sure that if I had a stronger background in programming and/or scripting I could have figured it out quite easily (for what it’s worth: I understand the code now ). But since I haven’t really been scripting before Powershell came along I just sat there scratching my head.

So let’s write a simpler guide!

Let’s start by explaining a briefly how Write-Progress works:
If you type the command in your Powershell console it will display the progress bar, but it will disappear again in a split second.
If you put your Write-Progress snippet in a script, the progress bar will be displayed until another Write-Progress snippet comes along, or until the script finishes.

The basic usage of Write-Progress is, as I wrote further up, something like this:

Write-Progress -Activity "Something" -Status "Something else" -CurrentOperation "thinking" -PercentComplete 30

That will create an output looking something like this:

It’s also quite easy to create a child progress bar by using the Id and ParentId parameters:

Write-Progress -Activity Something -Status "Something else" -CurrentOperation Thinking -PercentComplete 30 -Id 1
 Write-Progress -Activity "Another thing" -Status "Something different" -CurrentOperation Sleeping -PercentComplete 30 -Id 2 -ParentId 1

This will create an output looking something like this:

Cool ey?

Now, this is all fine and dandy as a starting point, and you CAN use write-progress this way in your scripts, but thats not exactly a dynamic way of doing it.
Often in your script you will have one or more foreach loops. Those are a great place to put your write-progress snippet and have PercentComplete and perhaps even Status or CurrentOperation filled out automagically.

First off we will need some data to parse through, I like to use Get-Process for that:

$data = Get-Process

Then we create a variable for our progress and set it to 1:

$progress = 1

This way PercentComplete will start at 1, you’ll see why in a bit.

Now we can create our foreach loop (I assume you know how they work):

$data | foreach {
 Write-Progress -Activity Sleeping -Status $_.ProcessName -CurrentOperation $_.Id -PercentComplete ($progress/$data.count*100) -Id 1
 Start-Sleep -Milliseconds 50
 $progress++
 }

This Write-Progress line will show Activity as “Sleeping”, the status will be the name of the process and currentoperation will be the ID of the process. Percentagecomplete will the correct progress (since $progress++ will increment $progress by 1 for each time the loop runs).
Start-Sleep is only there to delay the operation, so you can actually see whats going on.

So the final result will be:

$progress = 1
$data = Get-Process
$data | foreach {
 Write-Progress -Activity Sleeping -Status $_.ProcessName -CurrentOperation $_.Id -PercentComplete ($progress/$data.count*100) -Id 1
 Start-Sleep -Milliseconds 50
 $progress++
 }

And it will look something like this:

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