Subscribe via RSSAfter a long winter I think is time for a road trip. I will out and about over the next few months, hopefully speaking at an event near you. Many of the events are free or charge a small fee, but all I hope will be worth your time. These are the events I can…
PowerShell Morning Report with Credentials
I had an email about trying to use my Morning Report script to connect to machines that required alternate credentials. For example, you might have non-domain systems in a DMZ. Fair enough. Since most of the report script uses WMI, it wasn’t too hard to add a Credential parameter and modify the WMI code to…
Set GPO Status with PowerShell
Last week I dropped in on a class Jeremy Moskowitz was teaching on Group Policy to talk a little PowerShell. I was demonstrating the Get-GPO cmdlet and talking about the object you get back and how you can use it to filter and create reports. One of the attendees asked about changing the status. What…
Friday Fun A Graphical PowerShell History Picker
One of my favorite features in PowerShell 3.0 is that you can select items in Out-Gridview which will then pipe the object back to the pipeline. One way I’ve been using this is as graphical “picker” for command history. I use Get-History, actually its alias h, all the time. Once I know the history number…
Find Files with PowerShell 3.0
My last few articles have looked at using WMI and CIM_DATAFILE class to find files, primarily using Get-WmiObject in PowerShell. But now that we have PowerShell 3.0 at our disposal, we can use the new CIM cmdlets. So I took my most recent version of Get-CIMFile and revised it specifically to use Get-CimInstance. I also…
Find Files with WMI and PowerShell Revisited
Last week I posted a PowerShell function to find files using WMI. One of the comments I got was about finding files with wildcards. In WMI, we’ve been able to search via wildcards and the LIKE operator since the days of XP. In a WMI query we use the % as the wildcard character. Here’s…
Building Excel Reports with PowerShell
Last year I wrote a series of articles for the Petri IT KnowledgeBase on using Microsoft Excel with PowerShell. Today I received an email from a reader who had a question about article that showed how to build a drive usage report in Excel. In the article I suggest it wouldn’t be too difficult to…
Find Files with WMI and PowerShell
Finding files is one of those necessary evils for IT Pros. Sometimes we’re searching for a needle in a haystack. And it gets even more complicated when the haystacks are on 10 or 100 or 1000 remote computers. You might think using Get-ChildItem is your only option. Certainly it works, but if you are searching…
Rename Hashtable Key Revised
Last week I posted an advanced PowerShell function to rename a hashtable key. As usual, the more I worked with it the more I realized it was missing something – namely the ability the take a pipelined object. My original version assumed you had saved the hashtable to a variable. But as I was working…
Join PowerShell Hash Tables
I received a lot of feedback and interest in my ConvertTo-Hashtable function. One question I received was “Why?” Well, one reason might be that you want to combine two objects into a single object. Joining them as two hashtables makes this an easier process. First off, combining two hashtables is as simple as adding them…
Convert PowerShell Object to Hashtable Revised
A while back I posted an advanced PowerShell function that would take an object and convert it to a hashtable. The premise was simple enough: look at the incoming object with Get-Member to discover the property names then create a hashtable with each property name as a hashtable key. I’ve a need to use this…
Silly Saturday PowerShell Palindromes
Normally I post amusing PowerShell-related content on Fridays as part of my Friday Fun series. These are light-hearted articles about using PowerShell. Almost always they are not practical but they serve as a learning vehicle. My topic this week seems extra silly so I’m moving it to Saturday. I’m a pushover for alliteration. Last week…
Rename Hashtable Key
I use hashtables quite a bit. Often generating hashtables on the fly from other sources. But sometimes the hashtable keys that come from these external sources don’t align with what I intend to do with the hashtable. For example, one of the nifty things you can do with hashtables is splat them against a cmdlet…
PowerShell Graphing with Out-Gridview
I’ve received a lot of interest for my last few posts on graphing with the PowerShell console. But I decided I could add one more feature. Technically it might have made more sense to turn this into a separate function, but I decided to simply modify the last version of Out-ConsoleGraph. The new version adds…
PowerShell Console Graphing Revised
Many of you have been having fun with my PowerShell Console Graphing tool I posted the other day. But I felt the need to make one more major tweak. I wanted to have the option for conditional formatting. That is, display graphed entries with high values in one color, medium in another and low in…