There is this weird thing in Powershell that you might have come across if you have ever counted how many objects you have. In some cases Powershell will count 0 $null 2 3…
You could say that this is a side effect of how Powershell tries to "magically" simplify stuff. The thing is, it doesn't always happen, instead it depends on what it is you want to count. As an example it will happen when counting ADUsers but it won't happen when counting processes. In the example below there is a user called Patrik yet the count returns nothing, well, in reality it returns $null.
PS C:\> (Get-ADUser patrik -Properties DisplayName).DisplayName Patrik Johansson PS C:\> (Get-ADUser -Filter { DisplayName -like "*Patrik*" }).count PS C:\> (Get-ADUser -Filter { DisplayName -like "*Karl*" }).count 0 PS C:\> (Get-ADUser -Filter { DisplayName -like "*Anders*" }).count 2 PS C:\>
This could lead to some very unfortunate results if it where to happen in your script. Fortunately there is a very easy fix for it. Simply adding a @ before the parentheses forces Powershell to see it as an array and then it will count it just fine.
PS C:\> @(Get-ADUser -Filter { DisplayName -like "*Patrik*" }).count 1 PS C:\>
This is one of those weird things that after a while will come natural for you but that you will miss over and over in the beginning.
Now why exactly is that?
If you only wanted a fix for the problem you had you can stop reading now but if like me you want need to understand why exactly this happens this may be interesting for you.
I know I said it was weird but it is actually quite logical once you think about it some more. What happens is that if your cmdlet only returns one object, it will do just that, return that specific object, nothing more. But count is a method for arrays, since your object is not an array it won't have anything to count and will give you a null response. If however your cmdlet returns several objects those objects will be returned to you in the form of an array and as such will be countable
Happy scripting!