What does |% mean in PowerShell

Question

I've come across this today:

$tests = (Get-ChildItem . -Recurse -Name bin |% { Get-ChildItem $_ -Recurse -Filter *.Unit.Tests.dll } |% {  $($_.FullName) })
Write-Host ------------- TESTS -----------
Write-Host $tests
Write-Host -------------------------------
.\tools\xunit\xunit.console.exe $tests -xml test-report.unit.xml

I can't get my head around what '|%' is doing there. Can anyone explain what it used for please?

Answer 1

% is an alias for the ForEach-Object cmdlet.

An alias is just another name by which you can reference a cmdlet or function. For example dir, ls, and gci are all aliases for Get-ChildItem.

ForEach-Object executes a [ScriptBlock] for each item passed to it through the pipeline, so piping the results of one cmdlet into ForEach-Object lets you run some code against each individual item.

In your example, Get-ChildItem is finding all of the bins in a certain directory tree, and then for each one that is found, Get-ChildItem is being used to find all of the files underneath that match *.Unit.Tests.dll, and then for each one of those, the full name is returned to the pipeline (which is getting assigned to the $tests variable).