This week I thought we’d have a little fun with the PowerShell console and maybe pick up a few scripting techniques along the way. Today I have a function that changes the foreground and background colors of your PowerShell console to random values. But because you might want to go back to your original settings…
Category: Scripting
So you need to write a PowerShell script
So…you have decided to write a PowerShell script or have at least identified a need. What do you do first? If you say “Google or Bing”, I’d say you are wrong. In my opinion, when you are developing a PowerShell script, searching for an existing script is not the first step. Sure, you will likely…
More PowerShell Laziness
A few days ago I posted an article on using Update-TypeData to provide shortcuts to object properties. These shortcuts might save a few keystrokes typing, especially if you use tab completion. They can also give you more meaningful output. But you can take this even further and save yourself even more typing. How many of…
Scraping Sysinternals
Recently I was conversing with someone about my PowerShell code that downloads tools from the live Sysinternals site. If you search the Internet, you’ll find plenty of ways to achieve the same goal. But we were running into a problem where PowerShell was failing to get information from the site. From my testing and research…
Friday Fun with Formatting
PowerShell is very adept at retrieving all sorts of information from computer systems in your network. Often the data is in a format that is hard to digest at a glance. For example, when you see a value like 1202716672 is that something in MB or GB? What if you need to view that value…
PowerShell Reminder Jobs
This is something that might be better suited to one of my Friday Fun columns, but I’m enjoying this so much I couldn’t wait to share it. I don’t know about you but I spend much of my day in PowerShell or at least with a PowerShell session running. I have an ongoing quest to…
Test Subnet with PowerShell
A few years ago I published a PowerShell function to test IP addresses on a given subnet. I had an email the other day about it and I decided to refresh it. My new version adds a few bells and whistles that I think you might like. For example, you can now run it from…
Happy Birthday Pluralsight
Pluralsight is celebrating its 10th birthday today. As part of their celebration they are running a quick contest with a cool prize. They also asked authors for a birthday greeting or message. Since all of my courses are PowerShell related it seemed only fitting to do something like this: Sure, hardly a practical use of…
Configure Local User Account with DSC
Yesterday I posted an article on how to use PowerShell and the [ADSI] type accelerator to set a local user account. However, if you are running PowerShell 4.0 you have another option: Desired State Configuration (DSC). I’m going to assume you have some basic understanding of how DSC works. If not, head over to the…
Set Local User Account with PowerShell
The other day I received an email from a student asking for some help in using PowerShell to take care of a user account on a local computer. He not only wanted to be able to set the password, which he had already figured out, but also how to enable or disable the account, which…
Friday Fun: Create All PowerShell Profile Scripts
Whenever I train on PowerShell I inevitably get around to discussing PowerShell profile scripts. For those of you new to PowerShell, a profile script is where you put all the commands you want to run that will define your PowerShell session just the way you need it. You might load some snapins, create some PSDrives…
More Fun with String Properties
The other day I posted an article about converting string properties that you might get from running a command line tool into a PowerShell named property. I was continuing to experiment with it. Here’s some code on how I could use it. $raw = qprocess $properties = $raw[0] -split “\s{2,}” | Convert-StringProperty $raw | select…
Convert a String to a PowerShell Property Name
Over the last few years I’ve written and presented a bit on the idea of turning command line tools into PowerShell tools. We have a lot of great CLI based tools that are still worth using. What I’ve done is come up with tools and techniques for turning their output into an object that can…
Friday Fun: Find File Locking Process with PowerShell
I was asked on Twitter this morning about a way to find out what process has a lock on a given file. I’m not aware of any PowerShell cmdlet that can do that but I figured there had to be a .NET way and if I could find a code sample I could put something…
Find and Replace Text with PowerShell
I’ve just finished up a series of tweets with a follower who had a question about finding and replacing a bit of data in a text file. In his case it was a web.config file but it really could be any text file that you can view in PowerShell. In PowerShell 3.0 and later this…