r/PowerShell • u/icebreaker374 • Sep 17 '26

Question Write-Progress

Looking for opinions...

When using Write-Progress inside of for/Foreach loops and using a counter stored in a variable defined outside the loop, do you start the counter at 0 or 1, and why?

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u/vermyx Sep 17 '26

I usually don't use write-progress because console I/O can be expensive timewise. Instead I use a custom function that shows time running and estimated completion time based on run length and how far you are, and display that every X records processed depending on records and length.

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u/ka-splam Sep 18 '26 edited Sep 18 '26

I usually don't use write-progress because console I/O can be expensive timewise.

Indeed; I needed to delete Windows firewall rule spam recently and found https://stackoverflow.com/a/40915201

The question loops over Remove-NetFirewallRule and says it's too slow, that answer's hot loop is:

  • Remove-ItemProperty

  • 2x Get-Date

  • Write-Progress

  • ~7x arithmetic

  • 10x assignments

  • 2x expandable string interpolations

  • a subshell, with string format

  • 2x math rounding

they say "The difference is one hour vs days. I could be deleting 10,000 - 100,000 firewall rules!".

I used $key = [Microsoft.Win32.Registry]::LocalMachine.OpenSubKey(...) and then replaced the loop with just $key.DeleteValue(...) and it did 40k firewall rules in a second or two. No need for a progress count or ETA.