Last year I posted an article and a set of PowerShell functions to make it easier to format values. For some reason, I decided to revisit the functions and ended up revising and extending them. I modified Format-Value so that you can format a number as a currency or a number. Format-Value help (Image Credit:…
Category: Scripting
Teeing Up to the Clipboard
Because I spend a great part of my day creating PowerShell related content, I often need to copy command output from a PowerShell session. The quick and dirty solution is to pipe my expression to the Clip.exe command line utility. get-service | where { $_.status -eq ‘running’} | clip This works in both the console…
An Improved Get-Verb Command
A recommended best practice for PowerShell scripting, especially when developing functions, is to follow the standard Verb-Noun naming convention. The Verb should be a value from the list of approved .NET verbs. The easy way to see that list is with the Get-Verb cmdlet. The result will also indicate the verb group or category like…
Measuring Folders with PowerShell One More Time
I know I just posted an update to my Measure-Folder function but I couldn’t help myself and now I have an update to the update. Part of the update came as the result of a comment asking about formatting results to a certain number of decimal places. I typically the Round() method from the Math…
Creating a Hyper-V VM Memory Report
I use Hyper-V to run my lab environment. Since I work at home I don’t have access to a “real” production network so I have to make do with a virtualized environment. Given budgetary constraints I also don’t have a lot of high end hardware with endless amount of RAM and storage. So I often…
Measure that Folder with PowerShell Revisited
Last year I posted a PowerShell function to measure the size of a folder. I recently had a need to use it again, and realized it needed a few tweaks. By default, the original version recursively searched through all subfolders. But there may be situations where you only want to measure the top level folder,…
Simulating a PowerShell Demo
A number of years ago I published my version of a Start-Demo script. In my version, I can create a text file with all of the commands I want to run. It might look like this: Get-Date get-ciminstance win32_logicaldisk | select DeviceID,Size,Freespace :: get-service | where {$_.status -eq ‘running’} | Select Name,Status | Format-Table -autosize…
SQL Database Report Revised
Last year I wrote an article that explained how to use the SQLSERVER PSDrive to create an HTML report highlighting some server and database information. If you want a refresher you can find that article here. In short, you can install the SQL Server PowerShell module on your client desktop and use it to manage…
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…
More Fun Getting PowerShell User Groups
A few days ago I posted a PowerShell function to retrieve information about PowerShell user groups. That function returned basic group information like this. Each group on the site has its own page which is what that Link property is for. So it didn’t take much work to use the same techniques as my original…
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…
PSBlogWeek Ebook and PDF Available
We really appreciate the interest in our PowerShell Blog Week experiment. It was a lot of fun and it seems many of you got something useful out of it as well. I wouldn’t be too surprised if you don’t see another event later this year, most likely with even more contributors. In the mean time,…
PowerShell Blogging Week: Supporting WhatIf and Confirm
We hope you are enjoying this experiment in community blogging. In today’s contribution I want to demonstrate how you can add support for WhatIf and Confirm to your advanced PowerShell functions. It is actually quite easy, especially if your function is simply calling other PowerShell commands that already support –Whatif and –Confirm. The recommended best…
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…