Powershell: Should Test-Connection parameter -Continues be -Continuous ?

Created on 27 Mar 2019 · 7Comments · Source: PowerShell/PowerShell

I can't say grammatically why it should be, but it feels like it should be.

And aliased with Continues for compatibility.

Area-Cmdlets-Management Issue-Question Resolution-Fixed

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HumanEquivalentUnit

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Most helpful comment

After we move to .Net Core 3.0 we get some updates related to the cmdlet. Not all bugs was fixed there but we could review the cmdlet.
And main question is still how balance interactive and script experience.

iSazonov on 28 Mar 2019

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All 7 comments

Honestly, it sounds -Continuous was intended and simply misspelled.

(If you conceived of it as a _verb_ in the imperative mood, it would have to be -Continue, without the s).

mklement0 on 27 Mar 2019

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As a side note, the switch is exhibiting strange behavior when turned off on PowerShell Core 6.1.2 for macOS.

test-connection -continues:$false localhost | foreach-object { "hello $_" }
# the output is written to the host, not the output pipe

test-connection -continues localhost | foreach-object { "hello $_" }
# the output is passed to the output pipe and produces expected result

# also, & { test-connection localhost } pollutes
# the console/terminal/screen buffer before
# returning the object result.

The reason is the cmdlet is coded s.t. somehow it only looks at the parameter set (or forgets to look at the parameter set, or resolves the "overload" in an otherwise incorrect way)? (The same mistake is made for Get-AppxPackage -Online:$false, which crashes the process; but that's Windows-specific.) I guess this is worth another issue?

GeeLaw on 28 Mar 2019

It's not to do with this parameter. The PS Core implementation of Test-Connection writes a majority of its data to the host stream, and then submits a rather less useful object to the output stream. We have another issue on that somewhere, @iSazonov might know where. Too sleepy at the present to dig that one up.

I've been looking at fixing it and am happy to work on it, but we need to come to some consensus on what exactly the inner workings of that fix need to be first. 🙂