Q. What is the quickest way to get an object count in Windows PowerShell?

A. In my April 15, 2008, FAQ ("Q: How can I use Windows PowerShell to get a count of all of my machine's services?"), I created a service count using a Foreach loop, which increased a counter by 1 for each object returned from the Get-Service command, as the following code shows:

get-service | foreach {$t=0} {$t +=1} {"Total services: $t"}

A number of readers pointed out that I should've used the Measure-Object cmdlet with the following commands:

get-service | measure-object | select count

The output would be:

Count
  -----
  152

If I hadn't included the | select count command, the computer would have outputted other counts that don't apply to what I wanted, such as information about averages, sums, maximums, and minimums of the values passed.