PowerShell guidelines for -Confirm, -Force, and -WhatIf

Question

Are there any official guidelines from Microsoft about when to add -Confirm, -Force, and -WhatIf parameters to custom PowerShell cmdlets?

Answer 1

If you want to validate that your implementation of these common parameters is compliant to the guidelines (for example, Set-Xxx cmdlets should have -Confirm and -WhatIf), then you can use the excellent PsScriptAnalyzer module (which is based on code analysis).

Make sure the module is installed:

PS E:\> Install-Module -Name 'PsScriptAnalyzer'

Then run PowerShell Code Analysis as follows:

PS E:\> Invoke-ScriptAnalyzer -Path . | FL

RuleName : PSUseShouldProcessForStateChangingFunctions
Severity : Warning 
Line     : 78 
Column   : 10 
Message  : Function 'Update-something' has verb that could change system state. 
           Therefore, the function has to support 'ShouldProcess'.

Documentation (and sources) can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/PowerShell/PSScriptAnalyzer

Answer 2

As an added observation, -Force should not overrule -WhatIf. Or in other words: -WhatIf has priority over -Force.

If you use:

Get-ChildItem -Recurse | Remove-Item -Recurse -Force -WhatIf

it will result in the following output:

What if: Performing the operation "Remove Directory" on target "E:\some directory\".

It will not actually remove the items, even when -Force is specified.

This means that you should never write:

if($Force -or $Pscmdlet.ShouldProcess($)) {
    ...
}

Answer 3

I haven't researched whether the documentation is this detailed, but the following are based on my observations:

1. You should use -WhatIf for anything that makes a change. Updates are changes that can benefit from -WhatIf (e.g., what if you want to make a lot of updates?).

2. -Force means "force overwrite of an existing item" or "override a read-only file system attribute". In either case the success of the action depends on the user having permission.

3. -Confirm and -Force are not mutually exclusive. For example, you can confirm an action to write a file, but the file might be protected with the read-only attribute. In this case the action would fail unless you also specify -Force.