One of the features I truly enjoy about PowerShell, is the ability to have it present information that I need in a form that I want. Here’s a good example. Running Get-Process is simple enough and the output is pretty complete. But one thing that would make it better for me, is that sometimes I…
Tag: PowerShell
PowerShell Color Combos
A lot of my PowerShell work lately has involved color. I find myself using ANSI escape sequences quite often. I’m also playing with different color schemes in Windows Terminal. And I still on occasion find myself using Write-Host to display colorized messages. What has gotten trickier is that Windows Terminal schemes can redefine colors. What…
Answering the WSMan PowerShell Challenge
Today, I thought I’d share my solution to a recent Iron Scripter challenge. I thought this was a fascinating task and one with a practical result. I’d encourage you to try your hand at the challenge and come back later to see how I tackled it. The challenge is not only a good test of…
Active Directory Objects and the PowerShell Pipeline
This article is something I’ve been meaning to write for sometime. As often as I tell people PowerShell is easy to use once you understand its core concepts, that isn’t always the case. This is a problem my friend Gladys Kravitz brought to my attention some time ago. Like her, you probably have written a…
Friday Fun: Back to School with PowerShell
For today’s fun with PowerShell, I thought I’d share my solutions for a recent Iron Scripter challenge. If you aren’t familiar with these challenges, and you should be, they are designed to test your PowerShell skills and hopefully help you learn something new. There are challenges for all skill levels and you can tackle them…
Taking Issue with PowerShell
Do you have a moment? I think it’s time we had a little chat. No, no…you have done anything wrong. In fact, what I really need is your help. Because you are a member of the global PowerShell community, I felt I could talk to you. You do enjoy being a member of the community,…
Updated PowerShell Tools
I’ve released a new version of my popular PSScriptTools module, which you can install from the PowerShell Gallery. The module is collection of commands and tools that I use in my scripting and day-to-day work at a PowerShell console. Many of the commands run in Windows PowerShell and PowerShell 7, even on non-Windows systems. I…
Friday Fun – A PowerShell Nonsense Challenge
Today I thought I’d share my PowerShell solution to a recent Iron Scripter challenge. The challenge was to create PowerShell code that would create nonsense documents, with a goal of creating 10 sample files filled with gibberish. Yes, other than maybe wanting some test files to work with, on its face the challenge appears pointless. …
Doing More with Windows Sandbox
One of the reasons I was looking forward to updating to Windows 10 2004 was to have access to the Windows Sandbox feature. I think I tinkered with a pre-release version and was intrigued. I normally have a set of Hyper-V virtual machines that I can test with, but I’m always looking for something new…
Discovering Provider Specific Commands
I’ve been diving into PowerShell help lately while preparing my next Pluralsight course. One of the sad things I have discovered is the loss of provider-aware help. As you may know, some commands have parameters that only exist when using a specific PSDrive. For example, the -File parameter for Get-ChildItem only works in the file…
Updating PowerShell About Help
During some recent work, I realized my new Windows PowerShell 5.1 installs are missing the About help topics. Apparently, this is a known issue, although I don’t think it gets a lot of attention. Microsoft is working on improving updateable help for PowerShell 7 which I think will also have a beneficial change for Windows…
Answering the PowerShell Word to Phone Challenge
A few weeks ago, the Iron Scripter challenge was to write code to convert a short string into its numeric valuesusing the alphabet as it is laid out on a telephone. A number of solutions have already been shared in the comments on the original post. There are certainly a number of ways to meet…
Formatting PowerShell TimeSpans
I often will figure out how to do something and later struggle to remember how to do it a months later. Rather than trying to remember what piece of code I wrote, why not write about. Assuming I can remember! Anyway, here’s today’s “PSRemembery”. I often use code like this, and I expect many of…
An Expanded PowerShell Scripting Inventory Tool
The other day I shared my code that I worked up to solve an Iron Scripter PowerShell challenge. One of the shortcomings was that I didn’t address a challenge to include a property that would indicate what file was using a given command. I also felt I could do better with performance in Windows PowerShell…
Building a PowerShell Inventory
A few weeks ago, a new Iron Scripter PowerShell scripting challenge was issued. For this challenge we were asked to write some PowerShell code that we could use to inventory our PowerShell script library. Here’s how I approached the problem, which by no means is the only way. Lines of Code The first part of…