I use hash tables quite a bit and with the impending arrival of PowerShell 3.0 I expect even more so. PowerShell v3 allows you to define a hash table of default parameter values. I’m not going to to cover that feature specifically, but it made me realize I needed a better way to export a…
Category: Scripting
Maximizing the PowerShell Console Title Bar
A few days ago Boe Prox posted some very nifty PowerShell modules for using the title bar as a ticker for RSS feeds like the weather. I thought this was an awesome idea and an easy way to take advantage of what would otherwise be unused screen space. I was especially intrigued with his use…
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…
PowerShell in a Nutshell
This past weekend I did an online presentation for a friend of mine who teaches for ITT in Omaha, Nebraska. He wanted me to do a brief talk about what PowerShell is and show how to use it, especially for managing Active Directory. I probably went much longer than I needed but everyone seemed to…
Using Types with Imported CSV Data in PowerShell
The Import-CSV cmdlet in PowerShell is incredibly useful. You can take any CSV file and pump objects to the pipeline. The cmdlet uses the CSV header as properties for the custom object. PS S:\> import-csv .\testdata.csv Date : 1/18/2012 6:45:30 AM Name : Data_1 Service : ALG Key : 1 Size : 25 Date :…
Convert Text to Object Updated
I’ve had a few comments and emails lately about my post and script on converting text to objects. I decided the function needed a little more lovin’ so today I have an updated version, complete with comment based help. Function Convert-TextToObject { tasklist /s server01 /fo list | where {$_} | convert-texttoobject -group 5 Take…
The PowerShell Morning Report
I love how easy it is to manage computers with Windows PowerShell. It is a great reporting tool, but often I find people getting locked into one approach. I’m a big believer in flexibility and re-use and using objects in the pipeline wherever I can. So I put together a PowerShell script that I can…
Using Start-Job as a Scheduled Task
Here’s a technique you might want to use for ad hoc troubleshooting or reporting. Even though it is possible to set up scheduled tasks to run PowerShell commands or scripts, it is cumbersome and time consuming. PowerShell v3 offers a great alternative, but I’ll cover that another day. Suppose I want to do something every…
Format Leading Zeros in PowerShell
I’ve been working on a question in the forums at ScriptingAnswers.com and the need arose to create a folder name with a 4 digit number. But the number needed to have enough leading zeros so that the number was always 4 digits. For example, Test_0005 or Test_0456. The solution is to use the -f Format…
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…
Send PowerShell Reports by Mail
Today I came across a post about pinging a list of computers and send the results as a table via Outlook. Brian is a very smart Active Directory guy so I offered some PowerShell suggestions to make his task even easier. Obviously you can only offer so much in a blog comment, so I thought…
Friday Fun – Get Ranked Object
Earlier this week on Google Plus, Hal Rottenberg posted a PowerShell idea he had. His goal was to identify a group of objects that would be statistically significant. For example, given a collection of files, group the files by size but ranked by size so that you might have a group for the largest files,…
Friday Fun Drive Usage Console Graph
I think you’ll like this. Normally, I prefer my PowerShell commands to write objects to the pipeline. But there’s nothing wrong with sending output directly to the console, as long as you know that the output is intended only for the screen. What I find frustrating is the use of Write-Host when really, pipelined objects…
Updating Multi-Valued Active Directory Properties Part 1
Yesterday on Twitter, I got a tweet from @Docsmooth regarding how to update a multivalued property in Active Directory. There are a number of ways to handle this, especially from PowerShell naturally, so I tweeted one way in a series of tweets. But that’s a hard way to learn something, and anyone jumping in the…
Add WhatIf Support to Your PowerShell Scripts
In one of my recent articles for SMB IT, I included a PowerShell module. In the article I referenced that I included support for -Whatif in one of the functions. I was asked on Twitter to explain what I meant and how it works. So here goes.