In a previous tip you have seen that cmdlet errors can only be caught by an error handler if the -ErrorAction is set to "Stop". Doing this...
database-tools
Catching Non-Terminating Errors
Non-terminating errors are errors that are handled by a cmdlet internally. Most errors that can occur in cmdlets are non-terminating. You cannot...
Most Popular FAQs for SQL Doctor
SQL Doctor is one of the most popular products in the Idera portfolio and as such we get a variety of questions from users on how it works, where do...
Hiding Terminating Errors
Occasionally, you may have noticed that cmdlets throw errors although you specified "SilentlyContinue" as -ErrorAction. The -ErrorAction...
Getting Events From All Event Logs
Recently, a reader asked how to retrieve all events from all event logs from a local or remote system, and optionally save them to file. Here is a...
Running Background Jobs Efficiently
Using background jobs to run tasks concurrently often is not very efficient as you might have seen in a previous tip. Background job performance...
Parallel Processing in PowerShell
If a script needs some speed-up, you might find background jobs helpful. They can be used if a script does a number of things that also could run...
New SQLyog and MONyog coming – please upgrade soon!
We are about to release upgrades to both SQLyog and MONyog with an important fix: linked libraries possibly vulnerable to the 'Heartbleed'...
Converting Ticks into Real Date
Internally, Active Directory uses ticks (100 nanosecond units since 1601) to represent date and time. It has been hard in the past to convert these...
Logging Script Runtime
If you'd like to monitor how long a script takes to run, you could use Measure-Command, but this cmdlet is for diagnostic purposes only and...
Fixing Encoding for Excel CSV
When you save Microsoft Excel data as CSV, unfortunately the encoding does not match the default encoding used by Import-Csv. So when you import the...
Reading All Text
You can use Get-Content to read in any plain text file. However, Get-Content will return the file content line by line, and you get back a string...
Storing Secret Data
If you wanted to store sensitive data in a way that only you could retrieve it, you can use a funny approach: convert some plain text into a secure...
Using Encrypting File System (EFS) to Protect Passwords
If you absolutely need to hardcode passwords and other secrets into your scripts (which you should avoid for obvious reasons), then you might still...
Testing UNC Paths
Test-Path can test whether or not a given file or folder exists. This works fine for paths that use a drive letter, but can fail with pure UNC...
Enabling PowerShell Remoting
If you'd like to use PowerShell Remoting to execute commands and scripts on another machine, then you need to enable Remoting on the target side...
Enabling Classic Remoting
Many cmdlets have built-in remoting capabilities, for example Get-Service and Get-Process both have the parameter -ComputerName, and so does...
Exporting and Importing Credentials in PowerShell
Credential objects contain a username and a password. You can create them using Get-Credential, and then supply this object to any cmdlet that has...
Custom counter – deadlocks in the past X hours
In response to a couple of requests, here’s a custom counter that allows you to alert on the total number of deadlocks which happen in a...
Finding USB Stick Information
Did you know that Windows logs any USB stick type you ever used? To get that information from the Registry, simply use this function: function...
Finding Time Servers (And Reading All RegKey Values)
Maybe you'd like to get a list of timeservers registered in the Registry database. Then you probably run code like this: Get-ItemProperty -Path...
Finding Expired Certificates
PowerShell grants access to your certificate stores by using the cert: drive. You can use this drive to find certificates based on given criteria....
Submitting Arguments to EXE Files
Running applications such as robocopy.exe from PowerShell sometimes is not trivial. How do you submit arguments to the EXE so that PowerShell...
Applying NTFS Access Rules
There are many ways to add or change NTFS permissions. One is to reuse existing tools such as icacls.exe. This function will create new folders that...