Prepending a timestamp to each line of output from a command or executable

Question

I want to prepend a timestamp to each line of output from a command. For example:

foo
bar
baz

would become:

[2011-12-13 12:20:38] foo
[2011-12-13 12:21:32] bar
[2011-12-13 12:22:20] baz

where the time being prefixed is the time at which the line was printed. How can I achieve this with PowerShell?

@avakar I downvoted it; hover over the downvote arrow and the tooltip popup says that downvotes are for questions which show no research effort. Questions which are just statements "I need x" almost always gets a downvote from me, regardless of whether I try to comment or answer helpfully or not, because that's the design of the site. — TessellatingHeckler, Oct 29 '17 at 00:48

Burt_Harris · Accepted Answer · 2016-09-07T23:26:57.737

7

Assuming your command is a external command named foo, you can pipe it's output through a ForEach-Object to add the timestamp:

foo | ForEach-Object { "$(Get-Date -Format "[yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss]") $_" }

edited Sep 07 '16 at 23:26

answered Sep 07 '16 at 22:37

Burt_Harris

TessellatingHeckler · Answer 2 · 2017-10-29T00:49:54.730

3

You can make it a named column with something like:

x.exe |Select @{Name='XTime';Expression={"[$(Get-Date -Format 'yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss')] $_"}}

edited Oct 29 '17 at 00:49

answered Sep 07 '16 at 23:04

1

Should be `HH` instead of `hh`, the latter is for the 12-hour clock system. – avakar Oct 28 '17 at 15:10

2 Answers2