Powershell

In the PowerShell ISE editor, when you enter a dollar sign, an IntelliSense menu opens and displays all variables that are currently defined. When...

Often, there is a need to log information when a script runs. Instead of writing log information to a text file that you would have to maintain and...

In a previous tip you have seen that cmdlet errors can only be caught by an error handler if the -ErrorAction is set to "Stop". Doing this...

Non-terminating errors are errors that are handled by a cmdlet internally. Most errors that can occur in cmdlets are non-terminating. You cannot...

Occasionally, you may have noticed that cmdlets throw errors although you specified "SilentlyContinue" as -ErrorAction. The -ErrorAction...

Recently, a reader asked how to retrieve all events from all event logs from a local or remote system, and optionally save them to file. Here is a...

Using background jobs to run tasks concurrently often is not very efficient as you might have seen in a previous tip. Background job performance...

If a script needs some speed-up, you might find background jobs helpful. They can be used if a script does a number of things that also could run...

Internally, Active Directory uses ticks (100 nanosecond units since 1601) to represent date and time. It has been hard in the past to convert these...

If you'd like to monitor how long a script takes to run, you could use Measure-Command, but this cmdlet is for diagnostic purposes only and...

When you save Microsoft Excel data as CSV, unfortunately the encoding does not match the default encoding used by Import-Csv. So when you import the...

You can use Get-Content to read in any plain text file. However, Get-Content will return the file content line by line, and you get back a string...

If you wanted to store sensitive data in a way that only you could retrieve it, you can use a funny approach: convert some plain text into a secure...

If you absolutely need to hardcode passwords and other secrets into your scripts (which you should avoid for obvious reasons), then you might still...

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...

If you'd like to use PowerShell Remoting to execute commands and scripts on another machine, then you need to enable Remoting on the target side...

Many cmdlets have built-in remoting capabilities, for example Get-Service and Get-Process both have the parameter -ComputerName, and so does...

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...

Did you know that Windows logs any USB stick type you ever used? To get that information from the Registry, simply use this function: function...

Maybe you'd like to get a list of timeservers registered in the Registry database. Then you probably run code like this: Get-ItemProperty -Path...

PowerShell grants access to your certificate stores by using the cert: drive. You can use this drive to find certificates based on given criteria....

Running applications such as robocopy.exe from PowerShell sometimes is not trivial. How do you submit arguments to the EXE so that PowerShell...

There are many ways to add or change NTFS permissions. One is to reuse existing tools such as icacls.exe. This function will create new folders that...

If you just want to profile a local or remote system and get back the most commonly used pieces of information, then do not waste time for your own...

Sometimes, a script may need to run a command that needs elevation (Administrator privileges). Instead of requiring the script to run with full...

In the previous tip, we illustrated how you can use Registry information to find wireless network adapters. Here is now a function...

There are many ways of finding network adapters, but apparently none to identify active wireless adapters. All information about your network...

When a cmdlet returns raw data, you may want to convert the data into a better format. For example, WMI can report the free space of a drive but...

WMI can retrieve information about drives easily. This will get you the drive information for your local machine (use -ComputerName to access a...

Relative dates are important to get data within a special time frame, avoiding hard-coded dates and times. This script will get all error and...