powertips

Many console-based tools like driverquery, whoami, or tasklist provide useful information but the column names are localized and may differ,...

Get-Process returns a lot of information about running tasks but it does not return the process owners or the session a process is logged on to....

In PowerShell v2, to declare a function parameter as mandatory, you would decorate the parameter like this: param( [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)] $p )...

To find out the groups your account belongs to, there is a command line tool called whoami. This tool supports options to output the information as...

PowerShell v3 comes without help files. To get help, you need to download the help files first. In an elevated PowerShell console, use this command:...

Whenever you use Invoke-Command to remotely execute code, you will notice that PowerShell automatically adds the column PSComputerName to your...

There is a not widely known COM object that you can use to list all the installed Windows Updates on a machine. Here is the code: $Session =...

Assume your function wanted to know whether it is the last element in a pipeline or operating in the middle of it. Here is a way for a function to...

Let's assume your script wants to share status information via a balloon message in the system tray area. Here is a sample:...

PowerShell is all about trial and error, and when you want to save your interactive input to a script file, this is how it could be done:...

In a previous tip you learned how you can forward function parameters to cmdlets. But what if you just want to forward some of the parameters? Here...

When disk space gets low, you may want to clean up your temporary folder. The code deletes all files that are older than 30 days to make sure...

To filter folder content by file or folder, check whether the Length property is present. It is present for files and missing in folders: Dir...

Office365 comes with a complete set of PowerShell cmdlets. To review the cmdlets and what you can do with them, visit this URL:...

Select-String can find lines with a specific keyword. It can also include context-relevant lines before and after that line. This will filter the...

When you launch *.exe-applications with arguments, you may get exceptions because PowerShell may misinterpret the arguments. A better way to do this...

If you need to list all cmdlets that deal with file system-related tasks, try this: Get-Command -Noun item*, path Many of these cmdlets have...

To append a CSV file with new data, first of all make sure the type of data you append is the same type of data already in a file (or else column...

ConvertTo-CSV can create comma separated values (CSV) on the fly but it always adds a new header. To create CSV data without columns, take a look at...

In a previous tip we illustrated how -like can work on array. To iterate on that, check out how -like (in contrast to -contains) allows the use of...

If you need to get two random numbers from a given numeric range, and you want to make sure they cannot be the same, simply tell Get-Random to pick...

If you wanted to exclude results with empty (text) columns, you can filter based on $null values. This will get you all processes with a valid...

In a previous tip we showed you how you can add new drives to easily access your desktop, your cookies or media like music and video. However, when...

Use Select-Object to determine which information in a result you are interested in. Here are three easy rules for its parameters: Use -Property *...

In a previous tip we showed how Get-WmiObject can search for WMI class names. Some of the returned WMI class names aren't particularly useful,...

In PowerShell v2, to list only files or only folders you had to do filtering yourself: Get-ChildItem $env:windir | Where-Object { $_.PSIsContainer...

Finally, in PowerShell v3 the cmdlet Export-Csv got a new parameter called -Append! Now you can easily append information to an existing CSV file....

Since Select-String is such a useful cmdlet, the PowerShell decided to add an alias to it in PowerShell v3. The alias is called sls. Try this:...

In a previous tip we illustrated how you can create code snippets for PowerShell ISE v3 script editor using New-ISESnippet. All custom snippets are...

In PowerShell v3, Get-ChildItem now supports sophisticated filtering through its –Attribute parameter. To get all files in your Windows folder...