Out-Default: Linked "Out-Default: Secrets Revealed" article contains incorrect information

[mklement0]

The blog posted linked to via "Out-Default: Secrets Revealed" in the "See also" section contains incorrect information:

• Unlike what the blog post states, Out-Default is called even when the CLI (powershell.exe / pwsh) is called with the -NonInteractive switch.

• The blog post also states:

if your code from the non-Interactive session returns an object to a console session it will call Out-Default in that console session. Even running PowerShell.exe with the -noninteractive seems to ultimately pass to Out-Default even though it's not done within the interactive session itself. I don't have a way to test this, but the fact that objects returned from a non-interactive session end up properly formatted serves as good evidence.

That is generally not true:

• When the CLI is invoked with the command or script file specified as a string (as in the examples in the post; note that passing a command as a string is the only option when calling from outside of PowerShell), no objects are being returned, only strings, namely the lines of output resulting from the Out-Default call inside the CLI session; that is, the strings resulting from the CLI session's Out-Default call - the lines that make up the for-display formatting - are output as data to the caller's success output stream.

The situation is different if you call the CLI from within PowerShell and also use a script block { ... } for the command, in which case serialized XML representations are returned to the caller, which are indeed thendeserialized to objects (though often not type-faithfully) and then rendered via the caller's `Out-Default.

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Document Details

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• ID: ee6e614d-658d-32ac-dc39-e05e49e3da91
• Version Independent ID: aa4edc10-7fe1-7252-461a-998b6223f02e
• Content: Out-Default (Microsoft.PowerShell.Core)
• Content Source: reference/7/Microsoft.PowerShell.Core/Out-Default.md
• Product: powershell
• Technology: powershell-cmdlets
• GitHub Login: @SteveL-MSFT
• Microsoft Alias: slee