powertips

Maybe you have noticed that some PowerShell consoles have a nice blueish background while others default to black. Actually, the blueish background...

Well, ok, Consolas wasn't specifically designed for PowerShell but rather as an enhancement for all consoles. It is a new Microsoft font that...

Each PowerShell console has a small icon at the left of its title bar, and when you right-click this icon and choose Properties, you open the...

There are many autocompletion tricks built into PowerShell, and you probably know that pressing TAB is always a good idea to save typing. There is...

There are actually two places where your commands get stored: One is maintained by PowerShell (Get-History, Invoke-History). The other one is...

In our last tip, you learned that F7 opens a dialog with your command history. To select a command, you had to use the arrow keys to move to the...

Did you know that the PowerShell console shares some key shortcuts with classic cmd consoles? For example, press F7 to open a menu with your command...

If you happen to run Windows 7 already, not only will you get PowerShell V2. In addition, with the new "Superbar", you can create your...

Test-Path supports wildcards so if you'd like to know whether there are any PowerShell script files located in your home folder, try this:...

Test-Path can check whether a file or folder exists, but this does not tell you whether the path specified was actually a file or a folder. If...

Test-Path is your friend whenever you want to check whether a file or folder exists: Test-Path C:autoexec.batTest-Path C:windows Test-Path can check...

With just a couple of lines of code, you can create a HTML document listing each installed type face on your computer which you then can print out...

PowerShell internally always works with objects, and this can cause confusion when you mix object and string technologies. In a previous example,...

To get a list of all available font families on your system, you can load the .NET drawing library and then ask the InstalledFontCollection for all...

To find out all folders that contain no files, you can use this line: dir -recurse | Where-Object { $_.PSIsContainer } | Where-Object {...

Ever wanted to create a list of all folders and subfolders? It just takes one line: dir -recurse | Where-Object { $_.PSIsContainer } |...

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...

When you buy a new external USB drive, most of the time it is preformatted with the old FAT32 file system for compatibility reasons. You could...

Drive Labels are the names attached to logical disks. Using WMI, you can both read and write (change) drive labels. To read the existing drive...

If you ever needed a tool to find out the type of file system for any drive, take a look at this simple PowerShell function: function...

Sometimes, you need to call commands that require interactive input to work. For example, to find out existing drives with DiskPart, you would have...

In a previous tip, you learned how Select-String can filter string arrays based on a keyword. Have a look: route print | Select-String 127.0.0.1...

PowerShell captures any output from any command you enter. This is why you can always store command results in a variable, even with native...

Select-String can automatically search entire folders and scan all file contents for specific key words. All you do is to provide a path to scan,...

Select-String is a fun cmdlet. Whenever a command returns string data, Select-String filters out text that does not contain a specific keyword. For...

Sometimes you'd like to wait for a key press. The easiest way is to use Read-Host like this: Read-Host 'Please press ENTER' | Out-Null...

Sometimes, you may want to store information you gathered in different places into one single object and return this object to the caller. This is...

If you use a notebook and are on the road often, you may want a way to check the battery status so you can shut down your stuff in time. Here is a...

PowerShell is a dynamic language, and as Forest Gump put it, you never know what you get. For example, when you try and figure out the battery...

With New-Item, it is easy to create new registry keys: New-Item HKCU:SoftwareTestkey New-Item can only create one key at a time and fails if the...