Dreaming in PowerShell

Test-Driving PowerShell v3: How To Install And Run PSv3 BETA

A new PowerShell version is coming soon! The language itself will stay pretty much the same, but there are tons of cool new features that enhance performance and ease of use . A complete list of all of the new features is available here: http://www.microsoft...

Published Tue, May 15 2012 5:32 AM by Tobias

Filed under: CTP2, PowerShell V2, V3, vistalizator, MUI, Install

Managing Child Processes

Today in my training, a student asked how to manage child processes . That's not a bad question at all, and as it turns out, it's a great way to show off the capabilities of PowerShell . So why would you care about child processes in the first...

Published Wed, May 09 2012 5:09 AM by Tobias

Filed under: Recurse, Childprocess, Process, Win32_Process, Child

Don't Waste Speed - How To Activate The PowerShell Turbo Mode

This afternoon, my buddy Alexandar (and fellow PowerShell MVP from Serbia) reviewed another batch of PowerTips when he stumbled across some lines of code that looked a bit unintuitive to him and asked to rephrase them. Sometimes there is more than one...

Published Tue, May 01 2012 11:35 PM by Tobias

Filed under: Get-Content, Get-Random, $null, Out-Null

Displaying Data in Excel (and why it won't work)

It's pretty easy to send PowerShell results to Excel and display them nicely as a spreadsheet. Actually, here's a simple function called Out-ExcelReport . Pipe anything to it, and it shows up as an excel sheet (provided you have indeed installed...

Published Tue, Apr 24 2012 1:46 AM by Tobias

Filed under: Array, Excel, Out-String, -join

Finding Logged On User (and Writing To Other People's Registry)

How would I find out the currently logged on user on a remote machine ? And how can I remotely access another person's HKEY_CURRENT_USER registry hive? Here are some tricks you may want to try... Who's Logged On? To find out who's logged on...

Published Thu, Apr 19 2012 3:47 PM by Tobias

Filed under: Registry, WMI, HKCU, Remote

Shorten Path Names (and using Low Level API functions)

Path names can grow large, and sometimes there is just not enough room to display the entire path. There is no cmdlet either that would shorten the path for you. So let's take a look today at how you can access low-level Windows API functions from...

Published Wed, Apr 11 2012 10:22 AM by Tobias

Filed under: API, Here-String, PathCompactPathEx, prompt, Add-Type

Regular Expressions Are Your Friend (Part 3)

In Part 1 , you lerned how Regular Expressions can extract useful information from noise text. In Part 2 , we looked at using Regular Expressions to split text, yet another powerful technique to extract the pieces of information you may need. Today, we...

Published Fri, Dec 02 2011 2:27 PM by Tobias

Filed under: Replace, -replace, Regular Expression, RegEx, delegate

Regular Expressions Are Your Friend (Part 2)

In Part 1 , we used Regular Expressions to extract useful information from noise text. That was pretty cool, and we used the operator -match , the automatic PowerShell variable $matches and the powerful Get-Matches function. Today, we'll use Regular...

Published Mon, Nov 14 2011 12:37 PM by Tobias

Filed under: Split, path, Convert, -match, Regular Expression, RegEx, -split, splitting, hexadecimal

Regular Expressions Are Your Friend (Part 1)

Yes, regular expressions can be complex but hey no, they do not need to be! You can do amazing things with small and relatively simple regular expressions. So let’s take a look at it. Finding Information: -match Often, you need some piece of information...

Published Thu, Oct 27 2011 5:04 AM by Tobias

Filed under: -match, Regular Expression, RegEx, Get-Matches, Pattern, Parse

Reuse Your Code - Create Modules Automagically!

When you write scripts, you want to automate things, fair enough. When it comes to writing scripts, a lot of people do not automate, though. They do the same coding over and over again and waste time and consistency. So let’s look at some simple...

Published Fri, Oct 14 2011 7:34 PM by Tobias

Filed under: Module, Function, Out-TextReport, Out-Module, Deep Dive, Out-ExcelReport

Applying NTFS Permissions

Recently, I needed to create a folder with NTFS permissions . PowerShell can do that for you, and when you look at your weapons, you'll find that sometimes it is best to mix command types and not just stick to cmdlets. At the end, I had a handy function...

Published Wed, Sep 21 2011 1:21 PM by Tobias

Filed under: Folder, NTFS, get-acl, set-acl, cacls

Bulk-Renaming Files (and other magic)

Bulk-renaming files can cause some headache: maybe you'd like to nicely rename all your pictures with a keyword and an incrementing counter, or you'd want to clean up log files and assign them a standard name based on its creation date. It's...

Published Mon, Sep 12 2011 10:49 AM by Tobias

Filed under: Rename-Item, Bulk

Clever Splatting to Pass Optional Parameters

Getting system information from WMI is a pretty straight-forward thing with Get-WMIObject . You can even specify one or more computer names or IP addresses to retrieve the information remotely. That's all great, but how would you design a function...

Published Wed, Aug 03 2011 7:15 AM by Tobias

Filed under: Get-WMIObject, Splatting, $PSBoundParameters

Dealing With File Locks

Sometimes, when you try and access a file, it may refuse to open because it is locked by another user or process. Likewise, you may want to lock a file yourself to make sure the file is not accessed and read/changed while you are manipulating it. Which...

Published Thu, Jun 23 2011 1:40 PM by Tobias

Filed under: Lock, None, ReadWrite, File, Open

Renaming Files Puzzle - And Three Golden PowerShell Rules

I am moderator for one of our Ask-the-Experts forums , and every once in a while, I get questions I would like to discuss. Like this one: "I am tring to write a quick interactive command that will rename all the jpgs in the current directory and...

Published Mon, May 23 2011 2:57 PM by Tobias

Filed under: Where-Object, Pipeline, scriptblock, golden rule, foreach-object, rename

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