Powershell

PowerShell v3 Beta is available for quite some time now, so every now and then we start tossing in some PowerShell v3 tips. We'll clearly mark...

Sometimes you may want to hide drive letters in Windows Explorer from users. There's a Registry key that can do this for you. It takes a bit...

Sometimes, you may need to turn characters such as drive letters into numbers or even bit masks. With a little bit of math, this is easily doable....

Whenever you download something with IE, by default the files get stored in your personal download folder. Often, over time a lot of garbage can...

In a previous tip we showed how you can use the BITS service to copy files. The main advantage of BITS is that it can copy things silently in the...

Supplying parameters to a cmdet often results in very long lines like this one: Get-ChildItem -Path $env:windir -Filter *.ps1 -Recurse -ErrorAction...

You can use Copy-Item or the console applications xcopy and robocopy to copy large files. But did you know that you can also use the BITS service to...

Asterisk serve as wildcards, so how would you check for the presence of an asterisk? It's much harder than you might think: PS>...

If you'd like to add a path to the %PATH% environment variable, that's easy: PS> $env:path += '

With Get-WinEvent you can access the various Windows log files such as this one: PS> Get-WinEvent Microsoft-Windows-WinRM/Operational There is no...

Maybe you'd like to include dynamic information such as the current time into the title bar of your PowerShell console. You could update the...

There is a cool little tool called whoami.exe which is part of Windows ever since Windows Vista. Since it can provide results not just in plain text...

If you'd like to know in which groups you are member, here's a simple piece of code that returns the list of groups you belong to: PS>...

If you'd like to know your current user account, of course you can query environment variables like this: PS> $env:userdomain PS>...

PowerShell is loading .NET assemblies. These assemblies can be precompiled using the tool ngen.exe which improves loading times (because the DLLs no...

To get a list of month names, you could use this line: PS>...

By default, PowerShell uses jagged arrays. To create conventional symmetric arrays, here's how: PS> $array = New-Object 'Int32[,]'...

If your computer is logged on to an Active Directory, here is some code to get to your domain controllers. Note that this will raise errors if you...

In traditional batch files, you can use "&&" to execute a second command only if the first one worked. In PowerShell, the same can...

WMI is organized into namespaces which work similar to subfolders. Here's a line that lists all namespaces you got: PS> Get-WmiObject -Query...

Here's a cool little XML formatting tool. It takes the path to any XML file and allows you to specify an indent. Then, it saves the file as new...

Ok, this is more for the developers. To find out where your .NET Runtime folder is, try this line: PS> $path =...

Assume you want to send some information to another PowerShell session, or you'd like to have one session wait until another is ready. Here are...

In a previous tip we published the list of placeholders to define datetime patterns. You can use the very same placeholders to define your own...

In a previous tip we illustrated how you can use ParseExact() to parse custom datetime formats. This only works though if the date and time...

Sometimes, date and time information may not conform to standards, and still you'd like to interpret that information correctly as date and...

Parsing a date and/or time information is tricky because formatting depends on the regional settings. This is why PowerShell can convert date and...

Compare-Object is one of the most widely ignored most powerful cmdlet around. It can compare results and figure out differences. For example, if...

Sure you can use the command net use to map a network drive. But this would not check for existing mapped drives. Here's a small function that...

Ever wanted to read out the Windows license key? In the Windows Registry, this key is present, but it is stored as a digital ID. To convert it back...