In celebration of Friday the 13th I thought I would offer up a menu of 13 more script blocks. If you missed the first course, you can find the original 13 scrptblocks here. I'm not going to spend a lot of time going over these. Many of them are simple one liners. Some of them take parameters just like functions and scripts. The easiest way to execute any of the scriptblocks is to use the & operator. But these might also come in handy with any cmdlet that takes a scriptblock as a parameter value such as Invoke-Command.
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I think of scriptblocks as "quick and dirty" blocks of re-usable code. If you find something very useful, you might expand it into a full-blown function complete with error handling and verbose output. Or you might find a handy technique in one of these examples.
#1 Get top problem source from the last 500 event log entries
$topprob={Param($log="System") Get-EventLog -LogName $log -newest 500 -entrytype Error |
Group Source -NoElement | Sort Count | Select -last 1}
#&$topprob
#2 Get folder usage by owner in MB
$usage={Param($path=".") dir $path -recurse | Where {-Not $_.PSIsContainer} |
Select Fullname,Length,@{N='Owner';E={($_ | Get-ACL).Owner}} |
Group Owner | Sort Count -descending|
Select Count,Name,@{N='SizeMB';E={(($_.Group | Measure length -sum).sum)/1MB}}
}
#&$usage
#3 get empty event logs
$emptylog={get-eventlog -list | where {$_.entries.count -eq 0}}
#&$emptylog
#4 Get OS Install date
$install={Param($Computername=$env:computername) Get-WmiObject win32_operatingsystem -comp $computername |
select CSName,Caption, @{N="Install";E={$_.ConvertToDateTime($_.InstallDate)}}}
#&$install
#5 Test if running Windows 8
$test8={Param($Computername=$env:computername)
(Get-WmiObject win32_operatingsystem -comp $computername).Caption -match "Windows 8"
}
#&$test8 MyWin8
#6 Test if running PowerShell v3
$testPS3={Param($Computername=$env:computername)
(test-wsman -ComputerName $computername).Productversion -match "Stack: 3.0"}
#&$testPS3 MyWin8
#7 Get code snippets from help examples
$excode={Param($command="get-service") (get-help $command).examples.example | select code}
#&$excode get-process
#8 Count by 13
$countup={Param($count=5) $x=0; For ($i=0;$i -lt $Count; $i++) {$x+=13;$x}}
#&$countup 13
#9 get a 13 character random password
$randpass={ Param($length=13) $chars=[char[]](33..126) ; -join ($chars | get-random -count $length)}
#&$randpass
#10 Test if profile scripts exist
$profileCheck={
$profile | Select @{N="Type";E={"AllUsersAllHosts"}},@{N="Path";E={$_.AllUsersAllHosts}},@{N="Exists";E={Test-Path $_.AllUsersAllHosts}}
$profile | Select @{N="Type";E={"AllUsersCurrentHost"}},@{N="Path";E={$_.AllUsersCurrentHost}},@{N="Exists";E={Test-Path $_.AllUsersCurrentHost}}
$profile | Select @{N="Type";E={"CurrentUsersAllHosts"}},@{N="Path";E={$_.CurrentUserAllHosts}},@{N="Exists";E={Test-Path $_.CurrentUserAllHosts}}
$profile | Select @{N="Type";E={"CurrentUserCurrentHost"}},@{N="Path";E={$_.CurrentUserCurrentHost}},@{N="Exists";E={Test-Path $_.CurrentUserCurrentHost}}
}
#&$profileCheck | format-list
#11 get default printer
$defaultPrint={get-wmiobject win32_printer -filter "Default='True'"}
#&$defaultPrint
#12 get timezone
$tz={Param($computername=$env:computername) Get-WmiObject win32_timezone -computername $computername |
Select @{N="Computername";E={$_.__SERVER}},Description}
#&$tz
#13 find expired certificates
$expired={dir cert:\ -recurse | where {$_.NotAfter -AND $_.NotAfter -lt (Get-date)}}
#&$expired
#Invoke-command $expired -comp server01
Download the script file and watch out for black cats under ladders!
