The year is winding down and it is getting harder and harder to remain productive. So I’m trying to combine having some fun while still trying to help you learn PowerShell. I wrote a simple PowerShell script that randomly selects a Christmas themed quote and displays in a colorful fashion. When you run the script,…
Tag: PowerShell
A Better PowerShell More
In PowerShell, when I have a lot of output, I can use the legacy more.com command to page the results to the screen. Get-Process | more There’s not anything inherently wrong with this approach. Although one drawback is that it doesn’t work in the PowerShell ISE. For that reason alone I decided I needed a…
Computer Certificate tools
In my Pluralsight course on Advanced DSC I used a few functions I wrote to make it easier to work with computer certificates. If you need to encrypt things like passwords in a DSC configuration, you must some type of certificate thumbprint as well as a copy of the certificate. The idea is that you…
Adding Some Power to Hyper-V VM Notes
I use they Hyper-V virtual machine note to store system information. Here’s how I get it and set with PowerShell.
Friday Fun Learning from Spam
Today’s article is definitely on the amusing side, although hopefully it will make for an interesting learning opportunity. Earlier this week I was clearing out spam on my blog and found a comment that looked like the spammer’s template file. The comment contained a number of short entries like this: Sample spam template (Image Credit:…
Prompting for the Holidays
This should wait for a Friday Fun post but since it is December 1st I decided not to wait. It is that time of year again and my PowerShell prompt is colorful and sparkly. My holiday themed PowerShell prompt (Image Credit: Jeff Hicks) In my profile I have this code to use a new Prompt…
Friday Fun: Holiday Shopping with PowerShell
Once again, the holiday shopping season is upon us. But perhaps PowerShell can make it a little easier or at least a bit more fun. I’m sure many of you have shopped at NewEgg.com. Perhaps you plan to do so again this year for friends, family or even yourself. So why not let PowerShell make…
Historically Speaking
So I’ve recently had a need to begin using Slack. I started out using a web browser, but since there is a Windows client I decided to give it a go. This article isn’t about Slack as much as what I was curious about and how I decided to tackle the problem. I had read…
The PowerShell Night Shift
A few days ago I got a question on Twitter on how to push a long running command to the background but would also survive a user logoff. This is a pretty standard practice in the Linux world. In PowerShell we’ve had similar operations using the Start-Job cmdlet. With Start-Job you can run a scriptblock…
PowerShell Friday Fun: Capture the Command
This week’s Friday Fun actually has a purpose, at least for me. But I always hope you’ll pick up a tip or two that you can use in your own PowerShell work. Because I write a lot about PowerShell, I am constantly copying pasting between my PowerShell session and usually Microsoft Word. Although the same…
What Are You?
Here’s a quick way to tell whether a given machine is real or not: check the Win32_Baseboard class. You can use either Get-WmiObject or Get-CimInstance. Notice the results from a few physical machines. Now see the result when querying a Hyper-V virtual machine: I don’t have any VMware available so I don’t know what kind…
PowerShell Deep Dives Report
So I have the royalty statement for the PowerShell Deep Dives book for the second quarter of 2015. For those of you who own a copy, thank you. For those of you who aren’t aware, even though I have a royalty statement, that doesn’t mean I got paid. I have the statement because I was…
Where Did the Time Go?
Like many of you the work day just seems to fly by. At the end of the day I start wondering what I really got accomplished and what I actually did all day. Well if you are willing to face the truth I have a way to help. Last year I wrote about a PowerShell…
Mastery Mystery
More to come…
Hyper-V Memory Utilization with PowerShell
I really push the limits of my Hyper-V setup. I know I am constrained by memory and am hoping to expand my network before the end of the year. But in the meantime I have to keep close tabs on memory. I thought I’d share a few commands with you. I am assuming you have…