PowerShell PowerShell Background Jobs
Introduction
Jobs were introduced in PowerShell 2.0 and helped to solve a problem inherent in the command-line tools. In a nutshell, if you start a long running task, your prompt is unavailable until the task finishes. As an example of a long running task, think of this simple PowerShell command:
Get-ChildItem -Path c:\ -Recurse
It will take a while to fetch full directory list of your C: drive. If you run it as Job then the console will get the control back and you can capture the result later on.
Remarks
PowerShell Jobs run in a new process. This has pros and cons which are related.
Pros:
- The job runs in a clean process, including environment.
- The job can run asynchronously to your main PowerShell process
Cons:
- Process environment changes will not be present in the job.
- Parameters pass to and returned results are serialized.
- This means if you change a parameter object while the job is running it will not be reflected in the job.
- This also means if an object cannot be serialized you cannot pass or return it (although PowerShell may Copy any parameters and pass/return a PSObject.)
