Best way to write to the console in PowerShell

Question

I am having a little confusion about the various ways to print (echo) to the console. I have seen that there are multiple ways to write output to the console, such as:

Answer 1

Default behaviour of PowerShell is just to dump everything that falls out of a pipeline without being picked up by another pipeline element or being assigned to a variable (or redirected) into Out-Host. What Out-Host does is obviously host-dependent.

Just letting things fall out of the pipeline is not a substitute for Write-Host which exists for the sole reason of outputting text in the host application.

If you want output, then use the Write-* cmdlets. If you want return values from a function, then just dump the objects there without any cmdlet.

Answer 2

The middle one writes to the pipeline. Write-Host and Out-Host writes to the console. 'echo' is an alias for Write-Output which writes to the pipeline as well. The best way to write to the console would be using the Write-Host cmdlet.

When an object is written to the pipeline it can be consumed by other commands in the chain. For example:

"hello world" | Do-Something

but this won't work since Write-Host writes to the console, not to the pipeline (Do-Something will not get the string):

Write-Host "hello world" | Do-Something