Powershell

The cmdlet Get-Service has a number of drawbacks. For example, there is no parameter to filter running or stopped services, and the results do not...

Robocopy.exe is an extremely powerful and versatile built-in command to copy files efficiently from one location to another. Unfortunately, this...

Beginning in PowerShell 3, a PSCustomObject can easily combine valuable information that you gathered from different sources. Here is an example...

Here is a fun script that may not work forever. It takes one or more topics you choose, then returns one or more random quotes taken from the...

Ole Morten Didriksen has dug out some API calls that enable audio volume control (https://gist.github.com/oledid). With this, it is trivial from...

When you type “h” in PowerShell, you see the history of commands you entered during your session. Inspired by Pratek Singh...

Prateek Singh has invested some effort in creating a sanitized MAC vendor address list in CSV format which can be found in his blog...

Sometimes you may want to create irregularly shaped reports, that is reports in a non-table design. For this, PowerShell lets you connect to the...

When you load CSV data into Excel, you cannot specify formatting, fonts or colors. This is different when you load HTML data into Excel. Here is an...

The most simple way of creating Excel reports requires just a couple of lines of PowerShell code: dump the results to a CSV file, then submit it as...

In the previous tip we started to turn PowerShell results into HTML reports. The report content is now just fine. To impress people, the report just...

In the previous tip we started to turn PowerShell results into HTML reports. The report content is now almost done. You just may want to polish some...

In the previous tip we started to turn PowerShell results into HTML reports. It now needs some headers and footers. This is where we left off:...

In the previous tip we started to turn PowerShell results into HTML reports. So far, the report is produced but still looks ugly. This is where we...

To turn PowerShell results in a HTML report, simply pipe the results to ConvertTo-Html, then save the result to file. So in its most basic form, it...

On Windows 10, when you open a PowerShell console, simply hold CTRL+SHIFT, then turn your mouse wheel, to control console background transparency....

Sometimes, the Microsoft.Update.Session object is used to check whether a given update is present on a machine. Some authors query the text title...

When you want to examine installed updates on your machine, rather than searching for updates online and then comparing the installation status with...

When PowerShell asks Windows for updates via the Microsoft.Update.Session object, some information seems to be unreadable. The code below dumps...

Windows can automatically determine the updates that may be missing on your system, provided you have an Internet connection. PowerShell can use the...

In the previous tip we introduced the PreCommandLookupAction supported by PowerShell 3 and better. Today we have a special implementation for you....

PowerShell comes with a couple of “secret” (better: under-documented) settings. One is PreCommandLookupAction, and it gives you great...

In the previous tip you have discovered how ConvertFrom-StringData can turn plain text key-value pairs into a hash table. What’s missing is...

In the previous tip we used ConvertFrom-StringData to parse plain text key-value pairs into hash tables. Here is an example where such conversion...

Let’s assume you want to save settings to a file in the most simplest form. Your settings may look like this: $settings = ' Name=Weltner...

In the previous tip we presented code that would update the PowerShell title bar in a background thread, displaying a live clock. Wouldn’t it...

To continuously update the PowerShell title bar, and for example display the current date and time, you need a background thread that takes care of...

Add-Type can be used to load additional .NET assemblies from DLL files into PowerShell. This works well most of the time, and here is a sample call...

PowerShell maintains its own current location: PS> Get-Location Path ---- C:\Users\tobwe The current location applies to relative paths used with...

To find out the path your PowerShell is currently using, simply run Get-Location: PS> Get-Location Path ---- C:\Users\tobwe However, the current...