Richard Siddaway's Blog

Piping between functions

A question came up about piping between advanced functions. The input to the second function might be an array. To illustrate how this works imagine a function that gets disk information – or better still use this one. function get-mydisk { [ CmdletBinding...

Published Sat, Jan 19 2013 2:13 PM by Richard Siddaway's Blog

Filed under: PowerShell Basics

Starting virtual machines for WSUS

My test environment usually has a dozen or so machines at any one time. Some of these are short lived and used for a particular piece of testing – others are kept for years. I decided that I wanted to keep up to date on the patching of these virtual...

Published Thu, Jan 17 2013 1:48 PM by Richard Siddaway's Blog

Filed under: Hyper-V, Windows Server 2012, WSUS

Account SIDs–hopefully my last word

Ok the embarrassing moral of this story is that you shouldn't answer questions in a hurry at the end of the evening. 5 minutes after shutting down I realised that there is a far, far simpler way to get the info. Win32_AccountSID is a WMI linking class...

Published Thu, Jan 17 2013 2:26 AM by Richard Siddaway's Blog

Filed under: PowerShell and WMI

Account SIDs revisited

I realised there is an easier way to get the data function get-SID { param ( [string] $computername = $env:COMPUTERNAME ) Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_AccountSID -ComputerName $computername | foreach { $exp = "[wmi]'" + $( $_ . Element ) Read...

Published Wed, Jan 16 2013 4:47 PM by Richard Siddaway's Blog

Filed under: PowerShell and WMI

Passing function names

A question asked about passing a function name into another function which then called the function. It sounds worse than it is. if you need to pass the name of a command and then call it try using invoke-expression function ffour { Get-Random } function...

Published Wed, Jan 16 2013 4:33 PM by Richard Siddaway's Blog

Filed under: PowerShell Basics

Account SIDs

A question on the forum asked about finding the accounts and SIDs on the local machine. function get-SID { param ( [string] $computername = $env:COMPUTERNAME ) Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_AccountSID -ComputerName $computername | foreach { $da = ( ( $_...

Published Wed, Jan 16 2013 4:22 PM by Richard Siddaway's Blog

Filed under: PowerShell and WMI

UK PowerShell group – 29 January 2013

When: Tuesday, Jan 29, 2013 7:30 PM (GMT) Where: virtual *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Active Directory is one of the commonest automation targets for administrators. This session will covert the basics of automating your AD admin - scripts and the Microsoft cmdlets...

Published Wed, Jan 16 2013 2:29 PM by Richard Siddaway's Blog

Filed under: PowerShell User Group, PowerShell and Active Directory

PowerShell wins award

PowerShell has won one on InfoWorld’s Technology of the Year awards for 2013 See http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/80986/infoworlds-2013-technology-of-the-year-award-winners-210419#slide24 for details Read More...

Published Wed, Jan 16 2013 12:18 PM by Richard Siddaway's Blog

Filed under: PowerShell V3

Workflow article 4

The next in the series of articles on PowerShell workflows that are appearing on the Scripting Guy blog has been published. The articles in the series that have been published are: http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2012/12/26/powershell...

Published Wed, Jan 16 2013 11:57 AM by Richard Siddaway's Blog

Filed under: PowerShell V3

Updating Help on PowerShell v3

One of the new features in PowerShell v3 is the capability to update the help files. In fact you have to do this because PowerShell v3 doesn’t ship with any help files. Since Windows 8 RTM’d there have been a succession of new help files released. I discovered...

Published Tue, Jan 15 2013 3:38 PM by Richard Siddaway's Blog

Filed under: PowerShell V3

Select-string – keeping in context

Today’s question involves using the Context parameter: It's probably just me, but I've never gotten the switch '-context 5 or -context 2, 7' to work predictably - where 5 lines before and after or 2 before and 7 after will come...

Published Fri, Jan 11 2013 1:41 PM by Richard Siddaway's Blog

Filed under: PowerShell Basics

Workflow article 3

The next in the series of articles on PowerShell workflows that are appearing on the Scripting Guy blog has been published. The articles in the series that have been published are: http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2012/12/26/powershell...

Published Wed, Jan 09 2013 12:03 PM by Richard Siddaway's Blog

Filed under: PowerShell V3

Select-String - finding the first and last matches

Today's question concerns finding the first and last matches in a file Sometimes, I need to make two passes at seeking content in this file, once for the first occurrence; and a second grep for obtaining the last occurrence of a phrase. After the...

Published Wed, Jan 09 2013 11:56 AM by Richard Siddaway's Blog

Filed under: PowerShell Basics

Select-String–information on matching files

Following on from yesterday’s post this is the second question: Since I'm recursively searching thru files to find matching phrases, how can I obtain other directory service information about the matching files file(s) - this is more of a methodology...

Published Tue, Jan 08 2013 3:32 PM by Richard Siddaway's Blog

Filed under: PowerShell Basics

Select-String scenarios – fixed columns

I had some questions come in after mu recent post regarding select-string. I’ll answer them as a series of posts. First off: I'm recursively searching thru many files, and want to pull out specific data in 'fixed column' positions from...

Published Mon, Jan 07 2013 4:43 PM by Richard Siddaway's Blog

Filed under: PowerShell Basics

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Piping between functions

Starting virtual machines for WSUS

Account SIDs–hopefully my last word

Account SIDs revisited

Passing function names

Account SIDs

UK PowerShell group – 29 January 2013

PowerShell wins award

Workflow article 4

Updating Help on PowerShell v3

Select-string – keeping in context

Workflow article 3

Select-String - finding the first and last matches

Select-String–information on matching files

Select-String scenarios – fixed columns