Month: February 2013

Leading "0" in IP addresses can cause confusion because many network commands interpret octets with leading "0" as octal...

The new CIM cmdlets require PowerShell v3, but you can still remotely target older boxes without PowerShell v3 or PowerShell at all. By default, CIM...

In PowerShell v3, to work with WMI you can still use the old WMI cmdlets like Get-WmiObject. There is a new set of CIM cmdlets, though, that pretty...

You can use WMI to quickly find all details about your mouse and keyboard: PS> Get-WmiObject win32_PointingDevice | Where-Object { $_.Description...

In a previous tip we featured a piece of undocumented code that works in PowerShell v3 to list all built-in variables. Here is another approach that...

If you must make sure that a text has a fixed length and is neither shorter nor longer, here is the code to pad and cut the text to the desired...

Finding Built-In Variables...

In a previous tip you learned how to load additional .NET assemblies. This enables you to display dialog boxes like a MsgBox, pretty much like in...

When you want to load additional .NET assemblies to extend the types of object you can use, there are two ways of loading them: the direct .NET...

PowerShell 3.0 comes with two new help topics (among many others) that may be especially useful for those who work a lot with WMI (or would like to...

To spice up your scripts, PowerShell can use the system open file dialog, so users could easily select files to open or to parse. Here's the...

PowerShell can play WAV files, so you can add sound and special effects to your scripts (provided your system has a sound card): PS> $player =...

To access popular .NET types faster, PowerShell maintains a list of shortcuts called "type accelerators". That's why you can use the...

PowerShell automatically converts date and time information in various formats. If you'd like to know what formats are recognized by PowerShell,...

WMI represents all locally installed printers with its class Win32_Printer, so you can easily look what's installed: PS> Get-WmiObject -Class...

Sometimes, date and time information is not formatted according to the standards PowerShell understands by default. When this happens, you can...

PowerShell can access low-level COM interfaces to find out system information such as network access. This code returns a list of all active network...

When you need to log on with alternate credentials, cmdlets often pop up a login dialog, like here: $cred = Get-Credential If you wanted to run a...

Sometimes, just one line of PowerShell code gets you all the information you may have needed. There is a .NET type called NetworkInterface, for...