Powershell

In a previous tip we illustrated how you can extract the command from a command line and strip all arguments. Today, you get a function that does...

Sometimes it becomes necessary to extract the command name from a command line. Here is a function that can do this: And this is the code: function...

You may have seen script code that opens a MsgBox dialog box. Today, you get a piece of code that opens a MsgBox and plays a random sound, adding...

In a previous tip you learned how you can use Invoke-WebRequest to get image links from Google Image Search. Invoke-WebRequest can do better,...

Invoke-WebRequest is your friend whenever you want to download information from the Internet. You could, for example, send a search request to...

Each Windows log file has a list of registered event sources. To find out which event sources are registered to which event log, you can directly...

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...