During the most recent PowerShell Scripting Games, I was fortunate enough to be one of the judges. Now that the games have concluded I thought I’d share my reflections on the entries. Naturally these are merely my opinions but they are drawn from years of experience with PowerShell and almost 25 years as an IT…
Category: Scripting
There’s Sum-thing Happening Here
I am one of those IT Pros who keeps close tabs on system resources. I like to know what is being used and by what. As you might imagine, a cmdlet like Get-Process, is pretty useful to me. One of the things I’m always checking is how much memory Google Chrome is taking. I don’t…
Friday Fun: The Measure of a Folder
Last week, I demonstrated how to measure a file with PowerShell. This week let’s go a step further and measure a folder. I’m going to continue to use Measure-Object although this time I will need to use it to measure numeric property values. Here’s the complete function after which I’ll point out a few key…
Add Logon As Service Right with PowerShell
I saw a comment on Twitter today about a limitation in PowerShell. Specifically the ability to grant the logon as a service right to a user account. Manually, if you use the Services management console and specify the user, Windows will automatically grant that right. But if you are trying to do this from a…
Friday Fun: The Measure of a File
I’ve been working with PowerShell since the days of Monad and have written a lot of PowerShell scripts. Out of idle curiosity, and the need for a Friday Fun topic, I decided to see how many lines of PowerShell I have written. Or at least that are in my Scripts folder. Turns out I have…
Get PowerShell Parameter Aliases
During a recent PowerShell training class we naturally covered aliases. An alias is simply an alternate name, often something that is shorter to type, or maybe even more meaningful. There are aliases for commands, properties and parameters. Discovering aliases for commands is pretty easy with Get-Alias. Property aliases are discoverable using Get-Member. But, discovering parameter…
Convert Text to Object with PowerShell and Regular Expressions
A few weeks ago I was getting more familiar with named captures in regular expressions. With a named capture, you can give your matches meaningful names which makes it easier to access specific captures. The capture is done by prefixing your regular expression pattern with a name. PS C:\> “UNC is \\server01\public” -match “\\\\(?<servername>\w+)\\(?<sharename>\w+)” True…
Friday Fun: Messagebox Writer
For today’s fun I’m revisiting a topic I’m sure I’ve written about in the past and that is creating a graphical message box in PowerShell. There are a few ways you can do this from using the Visual Basic classes, the old standard WScript.Shell object from VBScript or using WinForms. They all basically work the…
PowerShell Essentials Webinar
Tomorrow I will be presenting a day of PowerShell training via a series of webinars for Windows IT Pro magazine. I will be presenting 3 webinars, each about 1 hour in length. The first webinar is on the PowerShell syntax and shell. Basically, how to survive in the shell if you are beginner. The second…
Creating CIM Scripts without Scripting
When Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 came out, along with PowerShell 3.0, we got our hands on some terrific technology in the form of the CIM cmdlets. Actually, we got much more than people realize. One of the reasons there was a big bump in the number of shipping modules and cmdlets was CDXML….
Friday Fun with REST, Regex and Replacements
I just love using the web cmdlets that were introduced in PowerShell 3.0. One of the cmdlets I use the most is Invoke-RESTMethod. This isn’t because I’m dealing with sites that offer REST-ful services, but rather I like that the cmdlet does all the heavy lifting for me when I point it to an RSS…
PowerShell Deep Dive First Sales
Last year I had the pleasure of editing PowerShell Deep Dives, published by Manning. This book is a community project with chapters contributed from MVPs and leading members of the PowerShell community. You won’t find this content anywhere else. Anyway, I have the first royalty report from Q3 2013. Looks like we sold a little…
Updated PowerShell Script Profiler
Last year I wrote a sidebar for the Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson and an update to his PowerShell Best Practices book. I wrote a script using the new parser in PowerShell 3.0 to that would analyze a script and prepare a report showing what commands it would run, necessary parameters, and anything that might pose…
Friday Fun: Does Anyone Really Know What Time It Is?
In PowerShell it is brain-dead easy to get the date and time with Get-Date. If you look through articles I’ve posted you’ll find plenty of examples using Get-Date and the [DateTime] object. But now that we’re getting ready for a new year, I thought you might be planning ahead and might want a few shortcuts…
Friday Fun: A Christmas Present for You
Over the years a number of people in the PowerShell community have shared Christmas and holiday related items. I’ve collected them and in some cases tweaked a little bit. This year I decided to wrap them all up in a module for you. This will work in PowerShell 2.0 and later. #requires -version 2.0 <#…