Select object properties in the pipeline
In addition to selecting the first or last number of rows from a collection, you can use Select-Object to specify the properties to display. You use the -Property parameter followed by a comma-separated list of the properties you want to display. If you think of a collection of objects as a table or spreadsheet, you're choosing the columns to display. After you choose the properties you want, Select-Object removes all the other properties (or columns). If you want to sort by a property but not display it, you first use Sort-Object and then use Select-Object to specify the properties you want to display.
The following command displays a table containing the name, process ID, virtual memory size, paged memory size, and CPU usage for all the processes running on the local computer:
Get-Process | Select-Object –Property Name,ID,VM,PM,CPU | Format-Table
The -Property parameter works with the -First or -Last parameter. The following command returns the name and CPU usage for the 10 processes with the largest amount of CPU usage:
Get-Process | Sort-Object –Property CPU –Descending | Select-Object –Property Name,CPU –First 10
Take care when specifying property names. Sometimes, the default screen display that PowerShell creates doesn't use the real property names in the table column headers. For example, the output of Get-Process includes a column labeled CPU(s). However, the System.Diagnostics.Process object type doesn't have a property that has that name. The actual property name is CPU. You can check this by piping the output of Get-Process to Get-Member.
Best Practice: Always review the property names in the output of Get-Member before you use those property names in another command. By doing this, you can help to ensure that you use the actual property names and not ones created for display purposes.