Powershell

PowerShell ISE In the PowerShell console, you can pipe commands to the old-fashioned “more.com”, or better yet, to Out-Host...

PowerShell 3.0 and later Sometimes it is important to know just how long a command takes. For example, to monitor web site response times, you could...

PowerShell 3.0 and later Out-GridView is a very useful cmdlet to output results to an extra window. Unlike outputting to the console, Out-GridView...

All PowerShell versions Typically, NTFS permissions in the file system are inherited. You can, however, add explicit permissions to files and...

All Versions Typically, to access COM objects, these objects need to register themselves in the Windows Registry, and PowerShell needs the...

GroupPolicy Module When you create a new Group Policy, you can set a comment (or description). There is no apparent way, however, to change the...

All PowerShell versions With Get-Acl, you can output the security information from files and folders as plain text in SDDL format (Security...

All PowerShell Versions Here is a clever trick how to find out how many lines a string (not a string array!) contains: $text = @' This is some...

All PowerShell Versions To find the smallest and largest item in a range of numbers, use Measure-Object: $list = 1,4,3,1,3,12,990 $result = $list |...

All PowerShell versions When you use Get-ChildItem to get a list of files, you may have noticed that the -Filter parameter occasionally returns more...

Test-Path can test whether or not a given file or folder exists. This works fine for paths that use a drive letter, but can fail with pure UNC...

Credential objects contain a username and a password. You can create them using Get-Credential, and then supply this object to any cmdlet that has...

Beginning in PowerShell 3.0, there is a new automatic variable available called $PSScriptRoot. This variable previously was only available within...

By default, Active Directory returns only the first 1000 search results when you use an ADSISearcher. This is a security mechanism designed to...

Active Directory accounts contain the SID in binary form. To convert the byte array into a string representation, use a .NET function like this: #...

When you export Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to CSV files, Excel by default saves CSV files in ANSI encoding. That's bad because special...

If you have a CSV file and would like to change the order of columns, simply import it into PowerShell, use Select-Object to change the order, and...

In a previous tip we explained how you can use slmgr, a built-in VBScript, to check Windows licensing state. The core information used by this...

When you divide numbers and just want the decimals before the decimal point, you could cast the result to integer. However, this would also round...

Removing multiple white spaces from text is easy in PowerShell. Simply use -replace operator and look for whitespaces ("\s") that occur...

PowerShell has built-in support for sending emails: Send-MailMessage! All you need is an SMTP server. However, with standard encoding you may run...

To read in a text file and skip blank lines, try this: $file = 'c:\sometextfile.txt' Get-Content $file | Where-Object { $_.Trim() -ne...

If you need to set the default value for a registry key, you can use either of these approaches: Set-ItemProperty -Path HKCU:\Software\Somekey -Name...

To scrape valuable information from websites with PowerShell you can download the HTML code and then use regular expressions to extract what you are...

PowerShell hash tables are, by default, not case sensitive: PS > $hash = @{} PS > $hash.Key = 1 PS > $hash.keY = 2 PS > $hash.KEY 2 If...

If you are using code that can only run in a 32-bit environment (i.e. using old database drivers or COM objects), here is a solution that will...

When working remotely in a peer-to-peer or cross-domain scenario, you will have to add all the computers you'd like to communicate with into the...

It isn't always easy to pick the right process because the process ID or process name may not be known or ambiguous. If the process has a window...

In the previous tip, you used a hash table to translate input values. However, unlike Switch-statements, Hash Tables have no "default" so...

Did you notice that Dir, ls or Get-ChildItem do not return hidden files? To see hidden files, you need to specify the -force parameter: Dir...