Powershell

All Help topics inside of PowerShell are stored as plain text files. You can read them by using Get-Help, but you can also more easily open the...

You are probably aware of CTRL+C to break the current command. However, you should beware of CTRL+BREAK! This key shortcut will not only break the...

While Get-Help does not just document cmdlets, it also allows you to find out more about general PowerShell concepts: Get-Help about_* For example,...

Reading Help information using Get-Help is great, but often (especially when specifying the -full or -detailed switch parameter), you retrieve so...

If you are new to PowerShell, you may be worried about causing unwanted damage or change. One way of childproofing PowerShell is by changing the...

Any cmdlet that can change and potentially damage your system supports the -whatif parameter, allowing you to just simulate the action without...

Many cmdlets support the -force switch parameter. With it, the cmdlet will do more than usual. What exactly -force does depends on the cmdlet. For...

You may already know about the Get-Process cmdlet, which lists all running processes, locally and remotely (use -computername for remote access)....

Sometimes, you need relative dates. What date was 14 days ago? Maybe you want to use this relative date to select files of a certain age. You can...

Get-Date not only will retrieve the current date, but you can also construct a custom date format to create time-stamped temporary file names:...

PowerShell v.2 comes with a new cmdlet called Get-Hotfix. It retrieves for you all installed hotfixes and updates. You can use it locally or...

The -as parameter is not widely known but is extremely versatile. It tries to convert data into a .NET type, and when it fails, it simply returns...

Get-WMIObject is a fantastic cmdlet to query information locally and on remote systems. Have a look: Get-Content c:\management.txt |ForEach-Object {...

How would you like to get back the big ugly block cursor you may know from Commodore 64-systems? Here is a way: $Host.UI.RawUI.CursorSize = 100...

Have you ever needed to resolve a host name to find its IP address? Simply use a .NET method and wrap it as PowerShell function: function...

When you make a function read-only, it can no longer be overwritten but you would still be able to delete the function and recreate it from scratch....

Functions by default have no write protection so they can easily be overwritten and redefined. You should do this if you'd like to make a...

When you access a database, the result is not automatically wrapped as objects so you cannot pipe the result into other cmdlets like Sort-Object or...

The easiest way of accessing databases right from PowerShell is to visit control panel and open the Data Sources (ODBC) module (which resides in...

One way to find out the owner of a process is to add the missing Owner property to process objects: $processes = Get-WmiObject Win32_Process -Filter...

Ever wanted to automatically change the Password a service uses to log on to its account? WMI has a solution. Have a look: $localaccount =...

You can easily add new properties and functions to object types using the extended type system. In this example, you append file objects with a new...

PowerShell cmdlets return objects with rich information, and to see all the information, you can pipe the result to Format-List *: Dir $env:windir |...

Select-Object can add new properties to objects and fill them with calculated content. All you need for this is a hash table with two pieces of...