Powershell

There is a tiny .NET function called GetHostByName() that is vastly useful. It will look up a host name and return its current IP address:...

When a file is stored on a drive with NTFS file system, you can attach data streams to it to store hidden information. Here is a sample that hides...

Ever needed a new local administrator account for testing purposes? Provided you are already Administrator, and you opened a PowerShell with full...

Microsoft Excel is an example of a program that is not easy to launch directly: the path to Excel may be different, depending on Office version and...

Any file you download from the Internet or receive via email get marked by Windows as potentially unsafe. If the file contains executables or...

To exclude results that have empty properties, you can easily use Where-Object. For example, when you run Get-Hotfix, and you only want to see...

PowerShell 4.0 (final version as found in Windows 8.1) has Foreach and Where built directly into arrays. This is a geek stuff, so there is no...

If you'd like to open a script in the ISE editor, one quick way is using the command "ise". For example, to open your profile script...

Beginning in PowerShell 3.0, when you press and hold ALT and then select something, you get a block selection. If you make this selection as narrow...

In a previous tip we used quser.exe to find the currently logged-on user on the local machine. Here is now a function that also allows us to find...

There is a helpful console application called quser.exe which will tell you who is logged on to a machine. The executable returns plain text, but...

Whenever someone logs on with invalid credentials, there will be a log entry in the security log. Here is a function that can read these events from...

To change the current desktop wallpaper and make this change effective immediately, PowerShell can tap into the windows API calls. Here is a...

In a previous tip you learned how systeminfo.exe can compose a rich system profile. systeminfo.exe has built-in remoting capabilities, so provided...

There is a little known trick that you can use to block-prepend or block-remove characters in the ISE editor. This feature was introduced in...

PowerShell plays friendly with existing console applications. One of the most useful is systeminfo.exe which gathers all kinds of useful system...

Since Start-Service has no -ComputerName parameter, you cannot use it easily to remotely start a service. While you could run Start-Service within a...

Console applications are equal citizens in the PowerShell ecosystem. In this example, a function uses icacls.exe to secure a newly created folder:...

When you run a PowerShell task, by default it has normal priority, and if the things your script does are CPU intensive, the overall performance of...

The Kerberos token size depends on the number of group memberships. In some corporate environments with heavy use of group memberships, the token...

Everything is connected these days. PowerShell can retrieve public data from web services. So here's a one-liner that gets you a list of the...

Get-EventLog can read events only from one event log at a time. If you want to find events in multiple event logs, you can append array information,...

Ordered hash tables are new in PowerShell 3.0 and great for creating new objects. Unlike regular hash tables, ordered hash tables keep the order in...

Getting relative dates (like yesterday or one week ahead) is easy once you know the Add…() methods every DateTime object supports. This would...

PowerShell is amazing. It will let you search YouTube videos for keywords you select, then offer the videos to you, and upon selection play the...

Windows 8.1 ships with a new module called "Defender". The cmdlets found inside enable you to manage, view and change all aspects of the...

Did you know that you can actually search for local user accounts, much like you can search for domain accounts? Here is an example code that...

In PowerShell, local accounts and groups can be managed in an object-oriented way thanks to .NET Framework 3.51 and above. This will list local...

Windows 8.1 still offers the old cmd.exe command window in some of its context menus. To change that and replace cmd.exe with powershell.exe, in...

Did you know that you can manage your Office365 accounts with PowerShell, too? Provided you have an Office365 account, try this: $OfficeSession =...