How does threading in powershell work?

Question

I want to parallelize some file-parsing actions with network activity in powershell. Quick google for it, start-thread looked like a solution, but:

T

Answer 1

You can't use threads directly like this, but you can't be blamed for trying since once the whole BCL is lying in front of you it's not entirely silly to expect most of it to work :)

PowerShell runs scriptblocks in pipelines which in turn require runspaces to execute them. I blogged about how to roll your own MT scripts some time ago for v2 ctp3, but the technique (and API) is still the same. The main tools are the [runspacefactory] and [powershell] types. Take a look here:

http://www.nivot.org/2009/01/22/CTP3TheRunspaceFactoryAndPowerShellAccelerators.aspx

The above is the most lightweight way to approach MT scripting. There is background job support in v2 by way of start-job, get-job but I figured you already spotted that and saw that they are fairly heavyweight.