Once again, the holiday shopping season is upon us. But perhaps PowerShell can make it a little easier or at least a bit more fun. I’m sure many of you have shopped at NewEgg.com. Perhaps you plan to do so again this year for friends, family or even yourself. So why not let PowerShell make…
Category: Friday Fun
Fun ways to use PowerShell yet still learn a thing or two.
PowerShell Friday Fun: Capture the Command
This week’s Friday Fun actually has a purpose, at least for me. But I always hope you’ll pick up a tip or two that you can use in your own PowerShell work. Because I write a lot about PowerShell, I am constantly copying pasting between my PowerShell session and usually Microsoft Word. Although the same…
Friday Fun: Tickle Me PowerShell!
I work at home for myself which means I have to act as my own assistant, reminding me of important events and tasks. And sometimes I need a little help. So why not use PowerShell? In the past I’ve used and written about using a background job to wait until a certain number of minutes…
Friday Fun: A Better PSEdit
In the PowerShell ISE, there is a built-in function called PSEdit. You can use this function to easily load a file in to the ISE directly from the ISE command prompt. Psedit c:\scripts\myscript.ps1 You can also load multiple files, but not as easily as you might like. I find myself wanting to do this: As…
Friday Fun: A PowerShell Macro
Today’s Friday Fun is a little different in that it showcases two things I use almost every day: Microsoft Word and PowerShell. I am writing new articles and material almost daily and of course very often the content is PowerShell related. Usually I use the blog post template in Word to make it easier to…
Friday Fun: I Can Run that Command in 3 Letters
If you have been using PowerShell for any length of time, I’m sure you are familiar with aliases. An alias is an alternative name to a PowerShell cmdlet. They are intended to serve as transition aids (like dir and ls) and as a means to keep interactive typing to a minimum. Although with tab completion,…
Friday Fun: Get PowerShell User Groups
The other day Don Jones tweeted about find a PowerShell user group. In case you didn’t know, just about every user group associated with PowerShell can be found online at http://powershellgroup.org. This is a terrific resource for finding a user group near you. Of course, Twitter being what it is someone joked about the lack…
Friday Fun: What’s My IP
Today’s Friday Fun is a “quick and dirty” solution to the question, “What is my public IP address?” There are plenty of web sites and services you can visit that will display that piece of information. Naturally I want an easy way to get this in PowerShell. Recently I came across a reference to a…
Friday Fun: Open Last File in the PowerShell ISE
Over the last few articles I’ve been sharing some shortcuts to get most recently used or edited files. For today’s Friday Fun I thought I’d share something that I use in my PowerShell ISE profile. Whenever I start the ISE, I automatically open the last file I was working on. Instead of launching the ISE…
Friday Fun: Get Recent Files
As you might imagine, I work on a lot of different files throughout the week. Sometimes it is hard to keep everything straight. I’ll want to return to script I was working on yesterday, but I can’t remember what I called it. So I spend a few minutes searching and filtering until I find it….
Friday Fun: Send PowerShell ISE Content to Word
Yesterday on Facebook, Ed Wilson was lamenting about confusion of keyboard shortcuts between PowerShell and Microsoft Word. I’ve run into the same issue. Muscle memory is strong. Then the discussion turned to getting content from the PowerShell ISE into a Word document. I humorously suggested we had a plugin and it had a Ctrl+C keyboard…
Friday Fun: Size Me Up
Part of day job involves creating training material, often in the form of video training for Pluralsight or articles for Petri.com. Since I usually am covering PowerShell I often need to capture a PowerShell session. And sometimes I want the screen to be a particular size. So over time I’ve created a few PowerShell tools…
Friday the 13th Fun
It is that time of year again. But instead of being freaked out by Friday the 13th, let’s have a little fun. Here is a collection of PowerShell one-liners, all celebrating 13. And maybe you’ll even pick up something new about PowerShell.
Friday Fun: Aren’t You Special
If you’ve been following my work for any length of time you know I am constantly going on about “objects in the pipeline”. But PowerShell is flexible enough that you should be able to use it as it meets your needs, provided you know the limitations for whatever path you take. Sometimes you really just…
Friday Fun: Creating Sample Files
Not too long ago I came across a PowerShell snippet, probably via Twitter, that showed how to use a few classes from the System.IO namespace to create dummy files. Sadly I forgot the record where I saw this first mentioned. What I liked about the code I saw was the ability to create a dummy…