for Statements

In PowerShell, a for loop is a type of control flow statement that allows you to iterate over a collection of items, executing a block of code for each item. The basic syntax for a for loop is:

for (initialization; condition; increment) {
    # Code to execute
}

Here’s a breakdown of each component:

• initialization: This is where you initialize the loop variable(s). This is typically where you set a counter variable to an initial value.
• condition: This is the condition that is checked before each iteration of the loop. If the condition is true, the loop body is executed. If it’s false, the loop is exited.
• increment: This is the code that is executed after each iteration of the loop. Typically, this is where you increment the loop variable(s).

Here’s an example of a for loop that prints the numbers 1 to 10:

for ($i = 1; $i -le 10; $i++) {
    Write-Output $i
}

In this example, $i = 1 initializes the loop variable to 1, $i -le 10 is the condition that checks if $i is less than or equal to 10, and $i++ increments $i by 1 after each iteration.

for loops can also be used to iterate over collections such as arrays and hashtables. In these cases, you can use the foreach keyword instead of for. The syntax for a foreach loop is:

foreach ($item in $collection) {
    # Code to execute
}

Here’s an example of a foreach loop that iterates over an array:

$fruits = @("apple", "banana", "orange")

foreach ($fruit in $fruits) {
    Write-Output $fruit
}

In this example, $fruits is an array of strings, and $fruit is the loop variable that holds each element of the array as the loop iterates. The loop body simply prints each element to the console using Write-Output.