topic Re: Need tips to format output generated by PSTK cmlet Invoke-NaSsh in Microsoft Virtualization Discussions

Need tips to format output generated by PSTK cmlet Invoke-NaSsh

netappwala — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 22:17:12 GMT

Hi,

Can someone please give me tips to format, cut and copy the output generated by PSTK cmdlet Invoke-NaSsh.

The specific requirement what I am looking is to grep few records from the outpt of [Invoke-NaSsh "sp status"]

Thanks

Charan

Re: Need tips to format output generated by PSTK cmlet Invoke-NaSsh

asulliva — Tue, 19 Jan 2016 21:51:13 GMT

Hello Charan,

Using regular expressions you can create a custom object which holds the information. Here is a crude example:

$output = "Service Processor           Status: Online
    Firmware Version:   1.0
    Mgmt MAC Address:   00:A0:98:13:9C:22
    Ethernet Link:      up
    Using DHCP:         yes
IPv4 configuration:
    IP Address:         172.22.131.145
    Netmask:            255.255.224.0
    Gateway:            172.22.128.1"

$spStatus = "" | Select Status,Firmware,MAC,LinkState,UsingDHCP,IP_Address,Netmask,Gateway

if ($output -match 'Status:\s*(.*)\b') {
    $matches
    $spStatus.Status = $matches[1]
} else {
    $spStatus.Status = "unknown"
}

if ($output -match 'Firmware Version:\s*(\d*\.\d*)') {
    $matches
    $spStatus.Firmware = $matches[1]
} else {
    $spStatus.Firmware = "unknown"
}

if ($output -match 'Mgmt MAC Address:\s*(.*)\b') {
    $matches
    $spStatus.MAC = $matches[1]
} else {
    $spStatus.MAC = "unknown"
}

if ($output -match 'Ethernet Link:\s*(.*)\b') {
    $matches
    $spStatus.LinkState = $matches[1]
} else {
    $spStatus.LinkState = "unknown"
}

if ($output -match 'Using DHCP:\s*(.*)\b') {
    $matches
    $spStatus.UsingDHCP = $matches[1]
} else {
    $spStatus.UsingDHCP = "unknown"
}

if ($output -match 'IP Address:\s*(.*)\b') {
    $matches
    $spStatus.IP_Address = $matches[1]
} else {
    $spStatus.IP_Address = "unknown"
}

if ($output -match 'Netmask:\s*(.*)\b') {
    $matches
    $spStatus.Netmask = $matches[1]
} else {
    $spStatus.Netmask = "unknown"
}

if ($output -match 'Gateway:\s*(.*)\b') {
    $matches
    $spStatus.Gateway = $matches[1]
} else {
    $spStatus.Gateway = "unknown"
}

$spStatus

Which would output this:

Status     : Online
Firmware   : 1.0
MAC        : 00:A0:98:13:9C:22
LinkState  : up
UsingDHCP  : yes
IP_Address : 172.22.131.145
Netmask    : 255.255.224.0
Gateway    : 172.22.128.1

Since it's an object you can address properties during control statements:

if ($spStatus.LinkState -ne "up") {
  # do something
}

Hope that helps,

Andrew

Re: Need tips to format output generated by PSTK cmlet Invoke-NaSsh

netappwala — Wed, 20 Jan 2016 15:19:00 GMT

Many Thanks Andrew; if possible plz explain the regex[$output -match 'Status:\s*(.*)\b'] that you have used as I am new to use regex.

Charan

Re: Need tips to format output generated by PSTK cmlet Invoke-NaSsh

asulliva — Wed, 20 Jan 2016 15:36:38 GMT

Regular expressions are used for pattern matching against strings. They can be used multiple ways, the most common being to check if a string contains some pattern, or to extract some text which matches a pattern. In this instance we're doing the latter.

if ($output -match 'Netmask:\s*(.*)\b') {
    $matches
    $spStatus.Netmask = $matches[1]
} else {
    $spStatus.Netmask = "unknown"
}

The first line checks to see if the string $output matches against the regular expression 'Netmask:\s*(.*)\b'. If it matches it goes into the if statement. Breaking out the regex used, there's a couple of things going on...

# look for the text "Netmask:" (no quotes, but colon required)
Netmask:

# followed by any number of white space characters, e.g. tab or space
# the \s is short for whitespace, the * is short for 0 or more
\s*

# capture any text after the last white space character
# the parenthesis denotes "capture text", the period is short for any character,
# and the * is short for any number of occurrences
(.*)

# stop capturing at the end of the word.  \b is short for "word boundary"
\b

Assuming it matches the regex, the extracted text will be found in a created array variable, $matches, with the first value ($matches[0]) being equal to the whole of the matched text, and the second and later values ($matches[1], etc.) equal to the extracted values.

There is a huge amount of information on regex out there. There's a decent reference of the special quantifiers and identifiers here. Regex can be complicated, but they've been around for a long time (Perl uses them heavily), so for most things you can search the internet and find an example or two to base yours off of.

Hope that helps.

Andrew

Re: Need tips to format output generated by PSTK cmlet Invoke-NaSsh

JGPSHNTAP — Wed, 20 Jan 2016 18:07:52 GMT

Very nice explanation and tip... Nice output

A quick way I do is

$v = Invoke-nassh "sp status"

$v = $v.split("`n")

$v | ? {$_ -like "*ip*"}