Powershell

A much awaited new cmdlet surfaced in PowerShell 5.0: Clear-RecycleBin! You can clear the recycle bin on a particular drive, or on all drives. This...

When you launch PowerShell, you should right-click the PowerShell icon in the taskbar and pin it to the taskbar. This way it is always visible, and...

In the previous tip we illustrated how the new "enum" keyword works in PowerShell 5.0 to set the values that are assignable to a...

Beginning with PowerShell 5.0, you can use the new keyword "enum" to create enumerations. They can be useful for parameter validation:...

When you remotely execute an application, it will run invisibly on the remote system. Here is some code that illustrates how you can run an...

If you need to change the content of a specific cell in an Excel spreadsheet, take a look at this sample code: $ExcelPath =...

The fastest way to read data from an Excel spreadsheet is to export the data to CSV, then use Import-CSV. However, sometimes the data in an Excel...

If all you need to do is minimizing all open windows, there is the Shell.Application COM object. PowerShell can access its methods via New-Object:...

In a previous tip we explained how PowerShell can access low level API functions such as ShowWindowAsync(). Once you better understand how a...

PowerShell can use C# to define new .NET types that access the internal Windows API methods. Here is some code that makes accessible the...

Sometimes, PowerShell modules ship as MSI packages. When they do, you never know what the installation logic does to your system. Unfortunately,...

If you have played with the early releases of PowerShellGet and the PowerShell Gallery (www.powershellgallery.com), you may still have a module...

If you want to convert a short 8.3 filename to its long file name, try something like this: PS> (Get-Item...

In PowerShell 5.0, a new .NET type was introduced that can help you escape text information so it can be displayed correctly: PS>...

Cleaning week comes to an end. As a last part, you may want to check the list of files you recently opened. This list is full of privacy sensitive...

Do you really need all the files you downloaded in Windows? It may pay off to look at the downloads, and delete downloaded files you no longer need....

Windows maintains a log file named cbs.log in $env:windir\logs\cbs. It logs various pieces of information related to the Windows trusted installer,...

In a previous tip you learned that there may be gigabytes worth of log file CAB files. Today, let’s try and have PowerShell do the cleanup....

When you run a Windows box for a couple of months or even years, a lot of disk space can be wasted by backed up log files that are not needed. So if...

In a previous tip you learned how to check for left-over files in both your own temp folder and the one maintained by Windows. Today, let’s...

This week is cleaning week, and we’ll show you tactics how you can potentially retrieve gigabytes of disk space, especially with machines that...

If you’d like to access any of the following special locations, then we have good news for you: PS C:\>...

You can use PowerShell remoting to transfer files across a network – this is new in PowerShell 5.0. This can be useful in closed environments...

Check out this simple way of creating temporary passwords: -join...