powertips

All PowerShell versions You do not necessarily need additional cmdlets to search for user accounts or computers in your Active Directory. Provided...

PowerShell 3.0 and newer To keep things simple, you may want to put PowerShell functions into a separate file. To load these functions into your job...

All PowerShell versions You can change all properties of objects when you clone them. Cloning objects can be done to “detach” the object...

All PowerShell versions When you create PowerShell functions, here is a template that defines a InputObject parameter that will accept multiple...

All PowerShell versions Here is the simplest way to read Registry values: $Key = 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows...

In a previous tip we illustrated how you can copy the previously entered interactive PowerShell commands to your favorite script editor. Here is a...

If you must know how many days are between two dates, you can easily find out by using New-TimeSpan: $startdate = Get-Date $enddate = Get-Date -Date...

In PowerShell 3.0, an option was added to define default values for arbitrary cmdlet parameters. This line, for example, would set the default value...

Often, scripts add new text to existing text. Here is a piece of code that may look familiar to you: Measure-Command { $text = "Hello" for...

To find all working days in a given month, here is a neat little one-liner: $month = 7 1..31 | ForEach-Object { Get-Date -Day $_ -Month $month } |...

Occasionally, you may notice that folders have a length of 1 byte. This was introduced in PowerShell 3.0. In PowerShell 2.0, they did not report...

Background jobs can be a great thing to speed up scripts because they can do things in parallel. However, background jobs only work well if the code...

PowerShell supports the keyword "exit" which is a scope-based. It may work much differently than you assumed it would. Let's take a...

There are two special keywords in PowerShell that you can use in loops: break and continue. With continue, the loop continues but skips the...

To read a Windows environment variable in PowerShell, simply use the prefix "env:": PS> $env:windirC:\WindowsPS> $env:USERNAMETobias...

Nested hash tables can be a great alternative to multidimensional arrays. They can be used to store data sets in an easy-to-manage way. Have a look:...

When you assign new items to an array often, you may experience a performance problem. Here is a sample that illustrates how you should not do it:...

Often, people use file-based logging. There is nothing wrong about that, but using the built-in event log system provided by Windows may be much...

With PowerShell, it can be a piece of cake to read out Registry values. Here is your simple code template: $RegPath =...

When you want to use error handlers with errors that occur inside a cmdlet, then you can only catch such exceptions when you set the -ErrorAction of...

You can use the -split operator to easily split a path in its components. The result is always an array. Simply use comparison operators to exclude...

Maybe you'd like to be able to occasionally skip certain parts of your profile script. For example, in the ISE editor, simply add this...

You probably know that PowerShell supports profile scripts. Simply make sure the file found in $profile exists. It's a plain script that gets...

There are plenty of low level system functions that PowerShell can use. This one, for example, creates a temporary file name:...