{"id":72541,"date":"2015-10-24T11:59:00","date_gmt":"2015-10-24T11:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.technet.microsoft.com\/heyscriptingguy\/2015\/10\/24\/powertip-prompt-for-input-for-powershell-script\/"},"modified":"2019-02-18T09:34:47","modified_gmt":"2019-02-18T16:34:47","slug":"powertip-prompt-for-input-for-powershell-script","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/powertip-prompt-for-input-for-powershell-script\/","title":{"rendered":"PowerTip: Prompt for Input for PowerShell Script"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><b style=\"font-size:12px\">Summary<\/b><span style=\"font-size:12px\">: Learn how to prompt for input for your Windows PowerShell script.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/29\/2019\/02\/q-for-powertip.jpg\" alt=\"Hey, Scripting Guy! Question\" \/>&nbsp;How can I use Windows PowerShell as an easy way to prompt a user for information for my script?<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-left:30px\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/29\/2019\/02\/a-for-powertip.jpg\" alt=\"Hey, Scripting Guy! Answer\" \/>&nbsp;Use&nbsp;<b>Read-Host<\/b>, for example:<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-left:120px\">$a = Read-Host -Prompt &quot;enter your input&quot;<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-left:90px\">The users input is stored in the&nbsp;<b>$a<\/b>&nbsp;variable.<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-left:60px\"><b>Note&nbsp;<\/b>&nbsp;Depending on what you are doing, using unchecked user input for your script can be dangerous. <br \/>It is best to limit user input to&nbsp;<span style=\"font-size:12px\">prespecified actions. The second best thing is to check the user input to <br \/>ensure that it meets certain requirements.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-left:30px\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/29\/2019\/02\/7610.Dr.ScriptoForTips.jpg\" alt=\" \" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Summary: Learn how to prompt for input for your Windows PowerShell script. &nbsp;How can I use Windows PowerShell as an easy way to prompt a user for information for my script? &nbsp;Use&nbsp;Read-Host, for example: $a = Read-Host -Prompt &quot;enter your input&quot; The users input is stored in the&nbsp;$a&nbsp;variable. Note&nbsp;&nbsp;Depending on what you are doing, using [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":596,"featured_media":87096,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[356,3,45],"class_list":["post-72541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-scripting","tag-powertip","tag-scripting-guy","tag-windows-powershell"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Summary: Learn how to prompt for input for your Windows PowerShell script. &nbsp;How can I use Windows PowerShell as an easy way to prompt a user for information for my script? &nbsp;Use&nbsp;Read-Host, for example: $a = Read-Host -Prompt &quot;enter your input&quot; The users input is stored in the&nbsp;$a&nbsp;variable. Note&nbsp;&nbsp;Depending on what you are doing, using [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/596"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72541\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}