database-tools

All PowerShell versions Aliases can be cool in interactive PowerShell but should not be used in scripts. In scripts, use the underlying commands (so...

All PowerShell versions While you can easily create new aliases with New-Alias or Set-Alias, there is no cmdlet to delete aliases. PS> Set-Alias...

All PowerShell versions You do not necessarily need additional cmdlets to search for user accounts or computers in your Active Directory. Provided...

PowerShell 3.0 and newer To keep things simple, you may want to put PowerShell functions into a separate file. To load these functions into your job...

All PowerShell versions You can change all properties of objects when you clone them. Cloning objects can be done to “detach” the object...

All PowerShell versions When you create PowerShell functions, here is a template that defines a InputObject parameter that will accept multiple...

All PowerShell versions Here is the simplest way to read Registry values: $Key = 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows...

In a previous tip we illustrated how you can copy the previously entered interactive PowerShell commands to your favorite script editor. Here is a...

If you must know how many days are between two dates, you can easily find out by using New-TimeSpan: $startdate = Get-Date $enddate = Get-Date -Date...

In PowerShell 3.0, an option was added to define default values for arbitrary cmdlet parameters. This line, for example, would set the default value...

Often, scripts add new text to existing text. Here is a piece of code that may look familiar to you: Measure-Command { $text = "Hello" for...

To find all working days in a given month, here is a neat little one-liner: $month = 7 1..31 | ForEach-Object { Get-Date -Day $_ -Month $month } |...

Occasionally, you may notice that folders have a length of 1 byte. This was introduced in PowerShell 3.0. In PowerShell 2.0, they did not report...

Background jobs can be a great thing to speed up scripts because they can do things in parallel. However, background jobs only work well if the code...

PowerShell supports the keyword "exit" which is a scope-based. It may work much differently than you assumed it would. Let's take a...

There are two special keywords in PowerShell that you can use in loops: break and continue. With continue, the loop continues but skips the...

To read a Windows environment variable in PowerShell, simply use the prefix "env:": PS> $env:windirC:\WindowsPS> $env:USERNAMETobias...

Nested hash tables can be a great alternative to multidimensional arrays. They can be used to store data sets in an easy-to-manage way. Have a look:...

When you assign new items to an array often, you may experience a performance problem. Here is a sample that illustrates how you should not do it:...

Often, people use file-based logging. There is nothing wrong about that, but using the built-in event log system provided by Windows may be much...