How to split long commands over multiple lines in PowerShell

Another method for cleaner argument passing would be splatting.

Define your parameters and values as a hashtable like this:

$params = @{ 'class' = 'Win32_BIOS';
             'computername'='SERVER-R2';
             'filter'='drivetype=3';
             'credential'='Administrator' }

And then call your commandlet like this:

Get-WmiObject @params

Microsoft Docs: About Splatting

TechNet Magazine 2011: Windows PowerShell: Splatting

Looks like it works with Powershell 2.0 and up

Ah, and if you have a very long string that you want to break up, say of HTML, you can do it by putting a @ on each side of the outer " - like this:

$mystring = @"
Bob
went
to town
to buy
a fat
pig.
"@

You get exactly this:

Bob
went
to town
to buy
a fat
pig.

And if you are using Notepad++, it will even highlight correctly as a string block.

Now, if you wanted that string to contain double quotes, too, just add them in, like this:

$myvar = "Site"
$mystring = @"
<a href="http://somewhere.com/somelocation">
Bob's $myvar
</a>
"@

You would get exactly this:

<a href="http://somewhere.com/somelocation">
Bob's Site
</a>

However, if you use double-quotes in that @-string like that, Notepad++ doesn't realize that and will switch out the syntax colouring as if it were not quoted or quoted, depending on the case.

And what's better is this: anywhere you insert a $variable, it DOES get interpreted! (If you need the dollar sign in the text, you escape it with a tick mark like this: ``$not-a-variable`.)

NOTICE! If you don't put the final "@ at the very start of the line, it will fail. It took me an hour to figure out that I could not indent that in my code!

Here is MSDN on the subject: Using Windows PowerShell “Here-Strings”

Trailing backtick character, i.e.,

&"C:\Program Files\IIS\Microsoft Web Deploy\msdeploy.exe" `
-verb:sync `
-source:contentPath="c:\workspace\xxx\master\Build\_PublishedWebsites\xxx.Web" `
-dest:contentPath="c:\websites\xxx\wwwroot,computerName=192.168.1.1,username=administrator,password=xxx"

White space matters. The required format is Space`Enter.