PowerShell guidelines for -Confirm, -Force, and -WhatIf

Question

Are there any official guidelines from Microsoft about when to add -Confirm, -Force, and -WhatIf parameters to custom PowerShell cmdlets?

Answer 1

I haven't researched whether the documentation is this detailed, but the following are based on my observations:

1. You should use -WhatIf for anything that makes a change. Updates are changes that can benefit from -WhatIf (e.g., what if you want to make a lot of updates?).

2. -Force means "force overwrite of an existing item" or "override a read-only file system attribute". In either case the success of the action depends on the user having permission.

3. -Confirm and -Force are not mutually exclusive. For example, you can confirm an action to write a file, but the file might be protected with the read-only attribute. In this case the action would fail unless you also specify -Force.