powertips

With New-PSDrive, you can create new virtual PowerShell drives to locations you often visit. New-PSDrive needs three pieces of information: the name...

Cmdlets and Functions most of the time support one or more parameters. Let's take this simple function. It defines two parameters called number and...

The family of Format-... Cmdlets is useful for outputting data into the console. You probably often used lines like this: Get-Service | Format-Table...

Switch parameters work like a switch, so they are either "on" or "off" aka $true or $false. To add a switch parameter to a...

PowerShell supports many different command categories and searches for the command in the following order: 1. Alias 2. Function 3. Cmdlet 4....

Alias names are a good way of making commands more accessible. The following line would enable you to quickly launch Internet Explorer by entering...

To find out all alias names associated with a given command, filter the alias list by its definition property. The following command lists all...

If you want to launch a script file or executable, in PowerShell, you'll need to specify either a relative or absolute pathname. To do so by...

If you have to batch-process tons of file names, you may want to make sure all file names are legal and automatically remove all illegal characters....

You can always strip all illegal characters from the path If you have no time to review path names and correct them manually to see if they...

While raw .NET calls provides you with granular control over how to validate paths and file names, there is a cmdlet called Test-Path for simple...

File names may not contain certain characters because they are illegal and cannot be processed by Windows. First, let's find out which...

Paths may not contain certain characters because they are illegal and cannot be processed by Windows. First, let's find out which characters are...

Whenever the built-in Split-Path cmdlet isn't enough, you can always resort to the real .NET class behind it. This class is called...

PowerShell comes with the Split-Path cmdlet, which helps you disassemble paths and find the interesting information. Take a look: Split-Path...

If you have ever written scripts using VBScript and now are trying to migrate them to PowerShell, you may miss a lot of useful commands not...

Strings represent text information and consist of individual characters. By casting, you can convert strings to individual characters and these into...

PowerShell uses .NET objects everywhere. Anything is represented as .NET object, and .NET objects come with useful built-in methods. However, for...

In a previous tip, you learned how to call an external VBScript from PowerShell and read back any text VBScript returned. We will now take a look at...

Sometimes, you may want to recycle old and proven VBScript scripts and call them from within PowerShell. In a previous tip, you have learned how to...

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...

It is easy for VBScript to call a PowerShell script as you have learned in a previous tip. PowerShell can even return a numeric value so your...

Maybe you are happy with other scripting languages, like VBScript, and would like to stick to that for awhile. Still, you'd like to enhance your...

Often, you want to submit additional arguments to a program file when you launch it, such as you want to open IE and have it navigate to some Web...

What if you'd like to launch a file with spaces in its path? The first rule is that spaces are separators, so PowerShell would separate it at...

For security reasons, PowerShell launches files only when specified with a relative or absolute path name. The only exceptions to this rule are...

The most important rule: always specify either an absolute or relative file path to whatever you want to launch - except if the file is located in a...

PowerShell uses virtual drives, which sometimes have a close mapping to the "real" drives you see in Windows Explorer. However, sometimes...

To delete things in the file system, you normally use a command like "del", which is an alias and points to Remove-Item in PowerShell:...