Sort and group objects by property in the pipeline
Some PowerShell commands produce their output in a specific order. For example, the Get-Process and Get-Service commands produce output that's sorted alphabetically by name. Get-EventLog produces output that's sorted by time. In other cases, the output might not seem to be sorted at all. Sometimes, you might want command output sorted differently from the default. The Sort-Object command, which has the alias sort, can do that for you.
Sort-Object
The Sort-Object command accepts one or more property names to sort by. By default, the command sorts in ascending order. If you want to reverse the sort order, add the -Descending parameter. If you specify more than one property, the command sorts by the first property, then by the second property, and so on. It isn't possible in a single command to sort by one property in ascending order and another in descending order.
The following commands are examples of sorting:
Get-Service | Sort-Object –Property Name –Descending
Get-Service | Sort Name –Desc
Get-Service | Sort Status,Name
By default, string properties are sorted without regard to case. That is, lowercase and uppercase letters are treated the same. The parameters of Sort-Object allow you to specify a case-sensitive sort, a specific culture’s sorting rules, and other options. As with other commands, you can review the help for Sort-Object for details and examples.
Grouping objects by property
Sorting objects also allows you to display objects in groups. The Format-List, Format-Table, and Format-Wide formatting cmdlets have a -GroupBy parameter that accepts a property name. By using the -GroupBy parameter, you can group the output by the specified property.
For example, the following command displays the names of services running on the local computer in two two-column lists that are grouped by the Status property:
Get-Service | Sort-Object Status,Name | fw -GroupBy Status
The -GroupBy parameter works similarly to the Group-Object command. The Group-Object command accepts piped input and gives you more control over the grouping of the objects. Group-Object has the alias group.