PowerShell: Redirection Operators

The redirection operators (>, >>, 2>, 2>>, 2>&1) send a command's or an expression's output to a file.

Encoding

It turns out that files are created with different encoding when using > in PowerShell 5.1 and PowerShell 7.1.

This is demonstrated with the following test script. It creates a file abc.txt and then displays each byte in the file that was created:

'abc' > abc.txt

if ($psVersionTable.psEdition -eq 'Desktop') {
   $bytes = get-content abc.txt -encoding byte
}
else {
   $bytes = get-content abc.txt -asByteStream
}

foreach ($byte in $bytes) {
  ' {0:x2} {1}' -f $byte, [char]$byte
}

Github repository about-PowerShell, path: /language/operator/redirection/encoding.ps1

In «ordinary» PowerShell, the file is created with a little-endian Byte Order Mark (BOM) and each characters is stored as UTF-16, thus requires two(!) bytes:

PowerShell Core is more reasonable and does not create the file with a BOM and uses UTF-8(?)

Because the redirection operators are aliased to out-file, the encoding for the files that are produced with the redirection operators can be controlled with the $psDefaultParameterValues variable:

$psDefaultParameterValues['out-file:encoding'] = 'utf8'

PowerShell: Redirection Operators

Encoding

See also