Understanding pipelines is not so much of a requirement if you plan to use PowerShell for only running commands on the console; it is well encapsulated, and the cmdlets are well designed to be able to handle passing objects between cmdlets. However, if you plan to create custom functions and modules, the concept of the pipeline is something you would want to understand well.

In this recipe, we will look into the two ways cmdlets accept input. At the point where we create functions, we will look at how to enable pipeline input for parameters.