Probably like many of you I keep almost all of my scripts in a single location. I’m also usually working on multiple items at the same time. Some times I have difficult remembering the name of a script I might have been working on a few days ago that I need to return to. The…
Category: Friday Fun
Fun ways to use PowerShell yet still learn a thing or two.
Friday Fun: PowerShell ISE Function Finder
At the PowerShell Deep Dive in San Diego, I did a lightning session showing off something I had been working on. Sometimes I don’t know what possesses me, but I felt the need for a better way to navigate my PowerShell scripts files that had many functions. Some files, especially modules, can get quite long…
Friday Fun: PowerShell Countdown
Recently, Josh Atwell posted a PowerShell script that performed a countdown. Naturally, I was inspired and did the whole “embrace and extend” thing. Don’t get me wrong: Josh’s script is perfectly fine. I saw some opportunities to try some things and use it as a teaching device. If nothing else, let’s have a little fun….
Friday Fun: 13 More Scriptblocks
In celebration of Friday the 13th I thought I would offer up a menu of 13 more script blocks. If you missed the first course, you can find the original 13 scrptblocks here. I’m not going to spend a lot of time going over these. Many of them are simple one liners. Some of them…
Friday Fun: Get Next Available Drive Letter
A few days ago I saw on question, I think on Facebook, about using PowerShell to find the next available drive letter that could be used for mapping a network drive. Before I show you my approach, let me state that if you need to map a drive in PowerShell for use only within your…
Friday Fun PowerShell Valentines Day
With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, I thought I should help you out with your gift giving. Remember those bags of candy with the cute sayings like “Be Mine”? Here’s how you can create a “bag” of them using Windows PowerShell; perfect for that extra geeky significant other. Or maybe you’ll just have fun…
Friday Fun Get Content Words
Recently I was tracking down a bug in script for a client. The problem turned out to be a simple typo. I could have easily avoided that by using Set-StrictMode, which I do now, but that’s not what this is about. What I realized I wanted was a way to look at all the for…
Friday Fun: A PowerShell Alarm Clock
Today’s Friday Fun is a continuation of my exploration of ways to use Start-Job. A few weeks ago I wrote about using Start-Job to create “scheduled” tasks. I realized I could take this further and turn this into a sort of alarm clock. The goal is to execute at command at a given time, but…
Friday Fun: Output to 2 Places in 1
Today’s Friday Fun comes out of a short exchange I had yesterday with Hal Rottenberg on Google Plus. We were playing around with piping a PowerShell command to Clip.exe which dumps the output to the Windows Clipboard. I got to thinking about taking this a step further based on my needs as a writer. Often…
Friday Fun What’s My Variable
I use scriptblocks quite a bit in my PowerShell work, often saved as variables. These are handy for commands you want to run again, but don’t necessarily need to turn into permanent functions. $freec={(get-wmiobject win32_logicaldisk -filter “deviceid=’c:'” -property Freespace).FreeSpace/1mb} Now in PowerShell I can invoke the scriptblock. PS S:\> &$freec 94079.72265625 Ok then. I have…
Friday Fun – A PowerShell Console Menu
When working in PowerShell, and especially when scripting, you might want to give the user a choice of actions. For example, you might develop a configuration script that another admin or technician will run. Perhaps one of the steps is to configure networking depending on their location so you want to give the person running…
Friday Fun Is It Today?
I was testing out the PowerShell cmdlets that ship with Backup and Replication from Veeam Software. I was using the cmdlet to return backup jobs and realized I needed a way to only get those objects where the date was today. Because the property was a complete date time object, I couldn’t simply check if…
Friday Fun – A Christmas Prompt
Over the last few weeks I’ve read about other people’s PowerShell prompts and offered a few suggestions of my own. This week’s Friday Fun creates colorful holiday prompt that counts down the number of days until Christmas.
Friday Fun – Get Number Object
You most likely know that I’m all about the object and the PowerShell pipeline. Everything in PowerShell is an object. Pipe something to Get-Member and you can discover all of the object’s properties and methods (ie its members). Some objects, like strings, have many methods but very few properties. Some objects, like numbers have very…
Friday Fun Convert Object to Hash Table
I’ve been working on a few PowerShell projects recently and one requirement I had was to turn an object into a hash table. I thought this was something that was already handled in PowerShell but I couldn’t find a cmdlet or an easy .NET technique. So I wrote my own function, ConvertTo-Hashtable. The function is…