powertips

If you have a CSV file and would like to change the order of columns, simply import it into PowerShell, use Select-Object to change the order, and...

In a previous tip we explained how you can use slmgr, a built-in VBScript, to check Windows licensing state. The core information used by this...

When you divide numbers and just want the decimals before the decimal point, you could cast the result to integer. However, this would also round...

Removing multiple white spaces from text is easy in PowerShell. Simply use -replace operator and look for whitespaces ("\s") that occur...

PowerShell has built-in support for sending emails: Send-MailMessage! All you need is an SMTP server. However, with standard encoding you may run...

To read in a text file and skip blank lines, try this: $file = 'c:\sometextfile.txt' Get-Content $file | Where-Object { $_.Trim() -ne...

If you need to set the default value for a registry key, you can use either of these approaches: Set-ItemProperty -Path HKCU:\Software\Somekey -Name...

To scrape valuable information from websites with PowerShell you can download the HTML code and then use regular expressions to extract what you are...

PowerShell hash tables are, by default, not case sensitive: PS > $hash = @{} PS > $hash.Key = 1 PS > $hash.keY = 2 PS > $hash.KEY 2 If...

If you are using code that can only run in a 32-bit environment (i.e. using old database drivers or COM objects), here is a solution that will...

When working remotely in a peer-to-peer or cross-domain scenario, you will have to add all the computers you'd like to communicate with into the...

It isn't always easy to pick the right process because the process ID or process name may not be known or ambiguous. If the process has a window...

In the previous tip, you used a hash table to translate input values. However, unlike Switch-statements, Hash Tables have no "default" so...

Did you notice that Dir, ls or Get-ChildItem do not return hidden files? To see hidden files, you need to specify the -force parameter: Dir...

Sometimes, you may have an existing VBScript that already does just what you want. You can easily incorporate any VBScript into PowerShell because...

In a previous tip, you learned how to call PowerShell statements and read their return value. Return values are somewhat limited because they can...

Sometimes, you may want to hide the code of your PowerShell script in order to protect passwords contained within the code. One way to safely...

WMI is an excellent way of remotely checking files or folders since it has the ability to access individual files and folders, and also works...

To convert the ASCII value to a character, use type casting like this: [char]65 To do the opposite and convert a character to its ascii value, use...

To make sure user input is a valid URL, you can use the System.URI type. Try to convert the raw string into this type. If it works, the string is a...

In PowerShell, you can initialize multiple variables in just one line. The following line sets all variables to the value 1: $a = $b = $c = $d = 1...

Hash Tables are convenient but are not true objects. This is bad because you are unable to output the hash content to formatting cmdlets or export...