posts-powershell

All PowerShell Versions Let's assume you want to identify suspicious service states like services that are stopped although their start mode is...

All PowerShell Versions Whether it is a birthday or an important game, you may want PowerShell to tell you just how many hours it is till the event...

All PowerShell Versions Strings enclosed by double-quotes will resolve variables so it is common practice to use code like this: $name = $host.Name...

PowerShell 3.0 or later To play a WAV sound file in a background process, PowerShell can use the built-in SoundPlayer class. It accepts a path to a...

All PowerShell Versions Windows starts a high definition counter each time it boots, and this counter will return the milliseconds the system runs:...

All PowerShell Versions If you'd like to know whether there are currently USB storage devices attached to your computer, WMI can help:...

All PowerShell Versions To test whether a particular service is still responding, use a clever trick. First, ask WMI for the service you want to...

All PowerShell Versions The WMI service can report plenty of details about the computer hardware. Typically, each type of hardware is represented by...

All PowerShell Versions If you want to find out whether a computer is frequently put into sleep or hibernation mode, here is a function that reads...

All PowerShell Versions When you parse text-based log files, or need to filter other types of information, you typically use Where-Object. Here are...

All PowerShell Versions Get-HotFix is a built-in cmdlet that returns the installed hotfixes. It has no parameter to filter on hotfix ID, though....

All PowerShell Versions Windows logs all shutdown events in its System event log. From there, you can extract and analyze the information. Here is a...

All PowerShell versions Get-ChildItem does not support advanced file filtering. While you can use simple wildcards, you cannot use regular...

All PowerShell versions When you use Get-ChildItem to get a list of files, you may have noticed that the -Filter parameter occasionally returns more...

All PowerShell versions When you run a console application inside the ISE editor, non-standard characters such as “ä” or...

PowerShell 3.0 and newer Here’s a quick function that works both in the ISE editor and the PowerShell console in PowerShell 3.0 and above):...

All PowerShell versions Group-Object can pile objects up, putting objects with the same property together in one pile. This can be quite useful,...

All PowerShell versions Writing PowerShell code is fun but can be frustrating at times. Here’s a function that makes PowerShell cheer you up....

All PowerShell versions You probably know that in a PowerShell console (not the ISE editor), you can turn on logging: PS> Start-Transcript This...

All PowerShell versions If your computer has a sound card, here is a code snippet that will drive your colleagues nuts: function prompt { 1..3 |...

All PowerShell versions If a PowerShell function needs to return more than one value, best practice is to return objects, and store the information...

All PowerShell versions If you find yourself editing the “hosts” file regularly, then it may be tedious to manually open the file in an...

All PowerShell versions Many cmdlets can deal with UNC paths, but using UNC paths can produce flaky scripts. Take a look at this: PS> Test-Path...

All PowerShell versions Searching the AD can be done with simple calls provided you are logged on an Active Directory domain. In a previous tip we...

All PowerShell versions In a previous tip we illustrated how to convert an internal PowerShell path format to a real path. Here is a use case. This...

All PowerShell versions Occasionally, you might stumble across strange path formats like this one:...

All PowerShell versions Let’s assume it’s your job to update a list of names. Here is an approach that will make sure that only first letter in a...

All PowerShell versions Here is a simple system call that will hibernate a system (provided of course that hibernation is enabled): function...

PowerShell 3.0 and newer When you use Get-ChildItem to list folder content, you can add the –Recurse parameter to dive into all subfolders....

All PowerShell versions Recent Windows operating systems like Windows 8 and Server 2012 come with great printing support, but if you run older...