How do I output text without a newline in PowerShell?

Question

Write-Host -NoNewline "Enabling feature XYZ......."

Unfortunately, as noted in several answers and comments, Write-Host can be dangerous and cannot be piped to other processes and Write-Output does not have the -NoNewline flag.

But those methods are the "*nix" ways to display progression, the "PowerShell" way to do that seems to be Write-Progress: it displays a bar at the top of the PowerShell window with progress information, available from PowerShell 3.0 onward, see manual for details.

# Total time to sleep
$start_sleep = 120

# Time to sleep between each notification
$sleep_iteration = 30

Write-Output ( "Sleeping {0} seconds ... " -f ($start_sleep) )
for ($i=1 ; $i -le ([int]$start_sleep/$sleep_iteration) ; $i++) {
    Start-Sleep -Seconds $sleep_iteration
    Write-Progress -CurrentOperation ("Sleep {0}s" -f ($start_sleep)) ( " {0}s ..." -f ($i*$sleep_iteration) )
}
Write-Progress -CurrentOperation ("Sleep {0}s" -f ($start_sleep)) -Completed "Done waiting for X to finish"

And to take the OP's example:

# For the file log
Write-Output "Enabling feature XYZ"

# For the operator
Write-Progress -CurrentOperation "EnablingFeatureXYZ" ( "Enabling feature XYZ ... " )

Enable-SPFeature...

# For the operator
Write-Progress -CurrentOperation "EnablingFeatureXYZ" ( "Enabling feature XYZ ... Done" )

# For the log file
Write-Output "Feature XYZ enabled"

While it may not work in your case (since you're providing informative output to the user), create a string that you can use to append output. When it's time to output it, just output the string.

Ignoring of course that this example is silly in your case but useful in concept:

$output = "Enabling feature XYZ......."
Enable-SPFeature...
$output += "Done"
Write-Output $output

Displays:

Enabling feature XYZ.......Done

To write to a file you can use a byte array. The following example creates an empty ZIP file, which you can add files to:

[Byte[]] $zipHeader = 80, 75, 5, 6, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
[System.IO.File]::WriteAllBytes("C:\My.zip", $zipHeader)

Or use:

[Byte[]] $text = [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.getBytes("Enabling feature XYZ.......")
[System.IO.File]::WriteAllBytes("C:\My.zip", $text)

Yes, as other answers have states, it cannot be done with Write-Output. Where PowerShell fails, turn to .NET, there are even a couple of .NET answers here but they are more complex than they need to be.

Just use:

[Console]::Write("Enabling feature XYZ.......")
Enable-SPFeature...
Write-Output "Done"

It is not purest PowerShell, but it works.

There seems to be no way to do this in PowerShell. All of the previous answers are not correct, because they do not behave the way Write-Output behaves but more like Write-Host which doesn't have this problem anyway.

The closes solution seems to use Write-Host with the -NoNewLine parameter. You can not pipe this which is a problem generally, but there is a way to override this function as described in Write-Host => Export to a file, so you can easily make it accept the parameter for an output file. This is still far from a good solution. With Start-Transcript this is more usable, but that cmdlet has problems with native applications.

Write-Outputsimply can't do what you need in a general context.