With such tiny masses they wouldn ' t hit the ground very hard <| sep |> No good turn goes unpunished . <| sep |> MIB post history confirms he is William <| sep |> Yeah , but Powershell pipes are more powerful than the bash ones bash follows the unix paradigm where everything is a file . The unix pipe transports character or byte streams . That was fine thirty years ago , and sufficient for manipulating text files a bit of sed or awk could build a quick parser that converted the formats used by the sender and receiver programs . However modern applications use data types that are much more complex than text files serializing them to character streams for piping to stdout , processing the resulting stream with text tools then deserializing it back can be really complicated . Powershell pipes aren ' t character streams . They transport full . NET objects between cmdlets the complexity is abstracted , and serialization and deserialization are handled by the system . Also , since many objects implement standard interfaces the user may not even need to write conversion code .