PowerShell / PowerShell/PSScriptAnalyzer

new feature: unusable parameters warning

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Issue - New Rule
Dominant language
C#
Stars
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Forks
414
Avg merge
13h 1m
Merged PRs (30d)
2

Description

Problem to be solved

PowerShell (theoretically) supports parameters whose name can consist only from numbers. For example, this is a valid declaration:

function p1([switch]$1) {if ($1) {'Yes'} else {'No'}}

However, it is very hard to call properly this script. This one will not work:

PS /home/iiric> p1
No
PS /home/iiric> p1 -1
No

This is because parser will think -1 is a negative number rather than a parameter name in this instance.

Proper (=hard) way would be to use splatting.

$params = @{ '1' = $true }
PS> p1 @params
Yes

Generally, this is not the only example of such unusable parameters. See response by @vexx32 in PowerShell repo issue.

Summary of the new feature

Create a PSSA rule that warns when such parameters are created, so users are aware ahead of time that they're making parameters that they won't be able to refer to.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reviewing existing PSScriptAnalyzer rules and how they report diagnostics, then examine the linked PowerShell issue for the cases considered unusable. Done means the analyzer warns when a parameter cannot be referred to normally, including a numeric-only parameter such as $1.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
csharp, powershell
Domain
tooling
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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