Powershell

Advanced PowerShell users often find themselves doing one of three things: They run a previous command and add Get-Member to learn more about the...

When you override Out-Default to do something meaningful, you really want to make sure the old behavior isn’t lost, and instead just something...

Out-Default is a hidden PowerShell cmdlet that gets called at the end of each command, and outputs results to the console. You can override this...

Typically, Out-GridView opens a window and displays whatever you pipe into the cmdlet: PS C:\> Get-Service | Out-GridView However, with a little...

At psconf.eu there was recently a challenge for the shortest code to check for how often a password was previously pwnd (hacked). Here is the result...

Some geocoding APIs provide sophisticated sentiment analysis like in the example below: "Most important museums of Amsterdam are located on the...

Geocoding can automatically extract geolocations from text. This example also shows a new way of submitting information to a server: in the example...

Today, we’d like to do the opposite and translate latitude and longitude into an address: '52.37799,9.75195' | ForEach-Object -Begin...

Let’s start with translating addresses into latitude and longitude coordinates. We assume you read the previous parts to fully understand the...

Last year, Google changed their terms and requires an individual API key now to use their geocode API. Fortunately, there are free alternatives, so...

Sometimes, web requests that work fine in a browser do not seem to work well in PowerShell. For example, when you navigate to...

When using comparison operators, always make sure the relevant part is placed left. That’s because PowerShell looks at the left side of an...

Whenever a user locks his machine, and whenever a user unlocks a machine, Windows emits an event. PowerShell can subscribe to these events and do...

The Windows Update Client maintains its own log of installed updates. Rather than querying the generic system event log, or actively searching for...

Get-Hotfix returns installed hotfixes but really only is a wrapper around the Win32_QuickFixEngineering WMI class. It is not returning all installed...

PowerShell can access the same logic that is used by the Windows Update Client, and query for missing updates: $UpdateSession = New-Object...

Ever wondered why your CPU load is so high at times, or why black windows open up for a split second? Then check your event log for program...

Provided you have Administrator privileges, here is a quick and easy way of dumping all login events. This way you can find out who logged in to a...

Often, URLs redirect to the final URL, so if you’d like to know where a given URL really points to, use a function like this: function...

When you download files from the internet and use PowerShell, you may want to find out how long the download will take. While you can check the size...

Sometimes it would be nice if a script was able to detect a key press without interfering with the script and its inputs. This way, you could add...

In the previous tip we looked at the FileSystemWatcher object and how it can monitor folders for changes. To not miss any changes, however, an...

Here is a chunk of code illustrating how PowerShell can use the FileSystemWatcher to synchronously watch a folder including subfolders for file...

When your company uses an authenticated proxy, PowerShell may not always be able to contact the Internet. You may have to instruct the web proxy to...