All Get-Cmdlets (cmdlets that start with "Get") have an automatic type accelerator. You can use those cmdlets without the verb. So...
database-tools
Exploring Privileges
On Vista with UAC enabled, you are not Admin by default. It might be interesting to find out if PowerShell currently has Admin privileges enabled....
Enumerating Drive Letters
Sometimes, you may want to find the next available drive letter for a network drive or enumerate drive letters for other purposes. An easy way to...
Listing Folders Only (and Finding Special Folders)
Get-Childitem returns both files and folders. If you just want to see folders, use a filter-based on folders that have a property called...
Finding (and Deleting) Duplicate Files
There are numerous ways of finding duplicate files. One approach uses Group-Object and groups your files by LastWriteTime and Length, assuming files...
Grouping Folder Items by Extension (and more)
Group-Object is a very powerful cmdlet as it takes one or more object properties and uses them to group the items. To get a quick overview of just...
Counting Items in a Folder
Get-Childitem returns all files in a folder. PowerShell returns an array if there are at least two items in a folder. To force PowerShell to always...
Converting Numbers
The .NET convert class is a great help when you need to convert numbers between different systems. Here's how you can convert a decimal into a...
Outputting HTML Reports
PowerShell can export results as HTML. Simply pipe the results to ConvertTo-HTML and save the result in a file. When you do that, it is wise to use...
Add Custom Properties
While objects contain a wealth of information, this information sometimes isn't in the right format. Let's take WMI objects representing...
Accessing Individual WMI Instances
You always get back all instances of a given WMI class when using Get-WMIObject. However, what if you just wanted to get a specific instance? Or you...
Free Space on Disks
You can use WMI to determine how much free space is available on any given disk: Get-WMIObject Win32_LogicalDisk | Foreach-Object { 'Disk {0}...
Converting User Input to Date
PowerShell uses the US/English date format when converting user input to DateTime, which can cause unexpected results if using a different culture....
Casting a Type Without Exception
Read-Host is a useful cmdlet to use to ask for user input. However, it returns user input always as generic string. Of course, you can always...
Order Matters
Here is a challenge for you. The following code is a simple currency converter. However, when you run it, you'll notice it doesn't convert...
Filtering Based On File Age
Every so often, you'll need to filter files by age. Maybe you'll only want to see files that are older than 20 days old and delete them or...
Accessing Date Methods
While Get-Date returns the current date and time, it really returns a DateTime object. You can use this object to find out more about the date or to...
Using Cultures
Since PowerShell is culture-independent, you can pick any culture you want and use the culture-specific formats. The following script instantiates...
Outputting Nicely Formatted Dates
Get-Date provides you with the current date and time. With the -format parameter, you can add style to it. For example, use -format with a lowercase...
Stopping and Disabling Services
You may find that Vista's new Instant Search can sometimes get out of hand and slow down your machine. Temporarily disabling and then stopping...
Accessing Static .NET
You can start to explore the power of .NET with PowerShell's built-in .NET access.. All you will need are square brackets to access static...
Arrays of Strings
In PowerShell, you can multiply strings: the string is repeated which can be useful for creating separators: '-' * 50 This works for words,...
Quick Loops
Normally, creating a simple loop in PowerShell can be a bit awkward: for ($x=
Understanding Exceptions (and why you can’t catch some errors)
Traps are a great way of catching exceptions and handling errors manually but this does not seem to work all of the time. This example catches the...