Hi @KirkMunro, I'm your friendly neighborhood Microsoft Pull Request Bot (You can call me MSBOT). Thanks for your contribution!
You've already signed the contribution license agreement. Thanks!

The agreement was validated by Microsoft and real humans are currently evaluating your PR.

TTYL, MSBOT;

I like the intent, but the problem is that top and bottom implies sorting unlike first and bottom which is not sorted. So ideally you would have:

get-process | select -top 10

but is this top 10 by cpu usage, workingset, etc?

Now we would have to include sorting semantics but this breaks the "do one thing and do it well" principle unless we can determine significant common use cases to justify it. For example would we want to support this?

get-process | select -top 10 -select workingset64 -desc

But that didn't really save much typing nor improve readability.

I agree with @SteveL-MSFT - -Top and -Bottom imply sorting whereas -First and -Last do not.

Now maybe it makes sense to add -Top and -Bottom to Sort-Object. That could even enable a faster sort by avoiding sorting elements that won't be written to the pipe.

I love @lzybkr idea of adding this to sort-object!

I'm "inside" this cmdlet last week and can say that it is very intuitive to the user UX and very controversial, it is a trick in the code, and any even slightly change this code can easily break down. In general I think this cmdlet should be replaced with a newer, which meets modern requirements to cmdlets (See #2421 ).

I like the idea of KirkMunro and I agree with @lzybkr that this idea should be implemented in Sort-Object.

I agree with all of the comments, and I sat on this idea for a while for exactly the reason that -Top and -Bottom might imply sorting. I had considered creating new parameter sets for Select-Object for -Top/-Bottom that included sorting, but I couldn't convince myself that baking sorting into Select-Object was the right solution since Select-Object is a pretty well defined atomic command. In the end I decided that as parameter aliases it wasn't so bad, and that if I was going to go the route of actually doing sorting and selecting I might create a different cmdlet instead. I hadn't thought about putting -Top/-Bottom as parameters on Sort-Object though, and I really like that idea -- it makes much more sense in the context of Sort-Object. Is that something you want to run with @lzybkr or do you mind if I have a look?

I have plenty on my plate, so consider the idea up for grabs.

@KirkMunro You caught the game - you cook 😊

(I believe it would be appropriate to close this PR and open a new Issue with full description of the idea.)

@lzybkr Thanks, I'll have a look.

@iSazonov Of course, the proposed sort-object changes will be submitted under a new PR (and I can probably create an accompanying Issue as well).

https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/blob/master/docs/maintainers/issue-management.md
I think it is a good practice to preliminary create a Issue (as Issue-Enhancement in this time).
Waiting news from you @KirkMunro !

@iSazonov I agree about creating an issue. I needed to do some research/experimentation first though to see what the solution might look like, see how other parameters would play with this feature, etc. I'm also getting ready for a conference, so busy right now, but I will move this along as soon as possible.

@KirkMunro Create Issue now and ask PowershellTeam to assign you. This will eliminate possible conflicts. You and we can also get early feedback to the time when you will have the opportunity to code. Good luck!