[scott_karana]

Powershell cmdlets are different(ly named) than executables/commands because they don't preferentially emit text: they emit .NET object streams. I suspect this is for compatibility/interrop reasons.

(They are implemented as .NET classes loaded from within libraries, as I recall. Eg, `import-module activedirectory` will load the entire library of AD cmdlets.)

Here's what you can do with object streams:

Get-ADUser | select FirstName,LastName,EmailAddress,Department | where {$_.FirstName -contains "Jeffery"} | format-table

In a traditional Unix pipeline, you'd have to make sure that none of the other fields contained "Jeffery", or you could get false positive results. For example, you might have to use multiple named pipes or temporary files for each of the table columns, and reinterpolate them into a table/CSV/whatever after doing the grep. You could always use Python/Perl/Ruby/Tcl instead of course, but those aren't really shells.

You can also do math, method calls, etc. The example above was just a trivial one.