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One of our readers came to me with this question. Well, I could answer it in a moment, but couldnt find a lot of traces on the internet.

Question:

While running a powershell cmdlet, the outputs contain dots as if there is something more but I dont want to display it?

An example is,

Get-PublicFolder -recurse |fl name,replicas

The output expected is a list of all public folder and their replica’s in a formal of Name and Replica, but the shell window wont display them all in a short and displays dots.

Reason:

This behaviour is by default and controlled by an entry $FormatEnumerationLimit which is 16 by default. This entry is stored in the Exchange.ps1 file located in the bin folder.

Can I edit this ?

Answer is no. The Exchange.ps1 file should be left like it is or it might fail to load the next time you run it (best practice).

Solution:

If powershell is going to give you outputs with dots, for that session alone you can edit and make the $FormatEnumerationLimit value to -1 which will let us see the output unlimited

To do this,

Open Exchange powershell and type:

[PS] C:\XXXXX\>$FormatEnumerationLimit
This will give us the output as 16

Now type:

[PS] C:\XXXXX\>$FormatEnumerationLimit =-1
This will make the entry unlimited for that session

To confirm the entry is updated, type “$FormatEnumerationLimit” again and the output will show as -1.

Now type the cmdlet which gave you output with dots and it will work flawless. Piping it to a txt file will be a better option.

—
Ratish Nair
MVP Exchange
Team@ MSExchangeGuru

Posted December 17th, 2010 under Powershell. RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback.