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

As an added observation, -Force should not overrule -WhatIf. Or in other words: -WhatIf has priority over -Force.

If you use:

Get-ChildItem -Recurse | Remove-Item -Recurse -Force -WhatIf

it will result in the following output:

What if: Performing the operation "Remove Directory" on target "E:\some directory\".

It will not actually remove the items, even when -Force is specified.

This means that you should never write:

if($Force -or $Pscmdlet.ShouldProcess($)) {
    ...
}