Powershell

GUIDs are "Globally Unique Identifiers," which are so random that you can safely assume they are unique worldwide. GUIDs are used whenever...

PowerShell comes with a lot of documentation. It is just sometimes hard to find. For example, to get a list of all available operators, do this:...

In PowerShell, you can initialize multiple variables in just one line. The following line sets all variables to the value 1: $a = $b = $c = $d = 1...

All Get-Cmdlets (cmdlets that start with "Get") have an automatic type accelerator. You can use those cmdlets without the verb. So...

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....

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...

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...

There are numerous ways of finding duplicate files. One approach uses Group-Object and groups your files by LastWriteTime and Length, assuming files...

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...

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...

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...

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...

While objects contain a wealth of information, this information sometimes isn't in the right format. Let's take WMI objects representing...

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...

You can use WMI to determine how much free space is available on any given disk: Get-WMIObject Win32_LogicalDisk | Foreach-Object { 'Disk {0}...

PowerShell uses the US/English date format when converting user input to DateTime, which can cause unexpected results if using a different culture....

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...

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...

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...

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...

Since PowerShell is culture-independent, you can pick any culture you want and use the culture-specific formats. The following script instantiates...

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...

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...

PowerShell supports two types of multi-dimensional arrays: jagged arrays and true multidimensional arrays. Jagged arrays are normal PowerShell...

While you can add and remove array elements with PowerShell arrays, this is an expensive operation and not recommended with large numbers of...

If you have ever written scripts using VBScript, you probably know COM objects which are DLLs and work like command libraries. You can use COM...

If you'd like to download larger files from the Internet and get a progress indicator, you can load the .NET Visual Basic assemblies, which...

You can tap into the wealth of .NET methods easily. Use New-Object to instantiate a new .NET class, and off you go. For example, instantiate an...

When you automate file system tasks, you may want to know where special folders such as MyPictures or Documents are located. The .NET class...

If you need to find helper files that are stored in the same folder, you may want to know where a given script is stored. The automatic variable...