How to pass large input to powershell - powershell

Question

Assuming powershell has a limit of N characters in its command, how can I pass more than N chars to the powershell cmdlet? Based on https://support.microsoft.com/en-in/kb/830473 link, it seems that the character limit is 8191 but it says that for cmd.exe, not sure what is the size limit for powershell. So if I have an input of size more than >8k, can I redirect the input to the powershell to circumvent this problem (solution based on what is mentioned in the referenced document).
Eg:
powershell console $> echo “a very long string” // the whole command including the echo and the very long string totalling less than 8192 chars on the powershell console. When I execute this I get the whole string as the output on the console
powershell console $> echo “a very long string // Try to add characters to the very long string, powershell doesn’t allow me to add more chars to the very long string if the total goes above 8192 since I guess I have reached the limit on the number of characters I can enter.
What I want:
powershell console $> echo // Place my input (which is more than 8192 chars) in a file and provide that as an input to echo and echo should display the complete string on the console thereby circumventing the limitation of the number of chars in a command.
The command echo I have used is only for representation purpose and I want to use a custom cmdlet instead of that so please consider this a valid scenario.
Edit 2:
psm1 file:
Function DoSomething {
[CmdletBinding()]
Param(
[Parameter(
Mandatory = $False)
]
[string]$v1,
[Parameter(
Mandatory = $False)
]
[string]$v2)
Begin {}
Process {
Write-Output "hello $v1 | $v2"
}
}
Text File Content say content.txt(short for representation purpose but assume this can be more than 8k characters):
-v1 "t1" -v2 "qwe"
Now when I do
powershell Console$> DoSomething (Get-Content content.txt)
the output that I get is
hello -v1 "t1" -v2 "qwe" |
I expect the output to be
hello -v1 "t1" | -v2 "qwe"
so that the execution of the cmdlet can happen without any issues. I tried this with the example of more than 8k characters in the text file and it is able to print the output, it is just that the parameters aren't getting separated. The command to provide the input to the cmdlet doesn't have to be Get-Content, it can be anything as long as it works.

Answer 1

You misunderstand how parameters in PowerShell functions work. The output of Get-Content is an array of strings (one string for each line in the file), but the entire array is passed to the first parameter. Also, a string isn't magically split so that the substrings can go to several parameters. How should PowerShell know which way to split the string?
A better way to deal with such input data is to have your function accept input from the pipeline:
Function DoSomething {
[CmdletBinding()]
Param(
[Parameter(
Mandatory=$false,
ValueFromPipeline=$true,
ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true
)]
[string]$v1,
[Parameter(
Mandatory=$false,
ValueFromPipeline=$true,
ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true
)]
[string]$v2
)
Process {
Write-Output "hello $v1 | $v2"
}
}
and define the data as a CSV (column names matching the parameter names):
v1,v2
"-v1 ""t1""","-v2 ""qwe"""
so that you can pipe the data into the function:
Import-Csv content.csv | DoSomething
With the function built like this you could also define the data as a hashtable and splat it:
$data = #{
'v1' = '-v1 "t1"'
'v2' = '-v2 ""qwe"'
}
DoSomething #data
For more information about function parameters see about_Parameters and about_Functions_Advanced_Parameters.

Answer 2

Else you can pass a path file where content of this file is used in your script ps. No limit then...