powertips

By default, the Telnet client is disabled on Windows systems. You can easily enable it with a one liner in PowerShell, though. Just launch a...

By default, PowerShell remoting uses Kerberos authentication and works only in domain environments, and only when you specify computer names, not IP...

The Test-Connection cmdlet implements a simple ping to check whether a system responds to an ICMP request. Unfortunately, you cannot specify a...

PowerShell 3.0 added an alternative to Get-WmiObject: Get-CimInstance seems to work very similar and can retrieve information from the internal WMI...

PowerShell has a built-in support to wait until a process or many processes end: simply use Wait-Process. There is no support to do the opposite:...

In the PowerShell ISE, there are two key shortcuts that can help you. Pressing TAB works just like in the console, and each time you press TAB, you...

If you have installed the free RSAT tools from Microsoft, you can use PowerShell to update information stored in your AD user account, for example...

Whenever you add delegation rights to an AD object (i.e. allow a user to manage the members of an organizational unit), you really invoke a change...

By default, AD objects are protected from accidental deletion. To remove this protection for all objects in a given scope (i.e. all objects in an...

In a previous tip you have seen that the PowerShell console supports all characters available in a TrueType font. You just need to convert the...

Did you know that console output can contain special icons like checkmarks? All you need to do is set the console to a TrueType font like...

You may know that each string object has a method called Trim() that trims away whitespace both from the beginning and end of a string: $text =...

Do you know off-hand what "break", "continue", "return", and "exit" do? These are powerful language...

Get-ItemProperty can easily read registry values, but you do not get back any information about the registry value type. Get-ItemProperty -Path...

PowerShell ISE In the PowerShell console, you can pipe commands to the old-fashioned “more.com”, or better yet, to Out-Host...

PowerShell 3.0 and later Sometimes it is important to know just how long a command takes. For example, to monitor web site response times, you could...

PowerShell 3.0 and later Out-GridView is a very useful cmdlet to output results to an extra window. Unlike outputting to the console, Out-GridView...

All PowerShell versions Typically, NTFS permissions in the file system are inherited. You can, however, add explicit permissions to files and...

All Versions Typically, to access COM objects, these objects need to register themselves in the Windows Registry, and PowerShell needs the...

GroupPolicy Module When you create a new Group Policy, you can set a comment (or description). There is no apparent way, however, to change the...

All PowerShell versions With Get-Acl, you can output the security information from files and folders as plain text in SDDL format (Security...

All PowerShell Versions Here is a clever trick how to find out how many lines a string (not a string array!) contains: $text = @' This is some...

All PowerShell Versions To find the smallest and largest item in a range of numbers, use Measure-Object: $list = 1,4,3,1,3,12,990 $result = $list |...

All PowerShell versions When you use Get-ChildItem to get a list of files, you may have noticed that the -Filter parameter occasionally returns more...

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...

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...

Beginning in PowerShell 3.0, there is a new automatic variable available called $PSScriptRoot. This variable previously was only available within...

By default, Active Directory returns only the first 1000 search results when you use an ADSISearcher. This is a security mechanism designed to...

Active Directory accounts contain the SID in binary form. To convert the byte array into a string representation, use a .NET function like this: #...

When you export Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to CSV files, Excel by default saves CSV files in ANSI encoding. That's bad because special...