I've tried searching around for this, and I can't find an answer, partially because it's difficult to search for the ">" character and also because the prompt in PowerShell uses that character.
I've got an example that works well, but I don't know what this line is doing exactly:
New-Item $tempCmd -Force -Type file > $null
I get the New-Item call and its parameters, but what is "> $null" doing exactly? And specifically what role does ">" play in this statement?
The > character does output redirection.
In an example it seems like it suppresses the output by redirecting it to null.
Microsoft has published a language specification for PowerShell 2.0 and PowerShell 3.0.
From version 3.0:
The redirection operator > takes the standard output from the pipeline and redirects it to the location designated by redirected-file-name, overwriting that location's current contents.
Your example has a null filename, so the output goes nowhere.
As nochkin says, people normally do this to stop a command from producing output. By default New-Item will output metadata about the new item to the host.
To acheive the same thing in a more readable way you can pipe the output to Out-Null.
New-Item $tempCmd -Force -Type file | Out-Null
From the documentation:
Deletes output instead of sending it down the pipeline.
