posts-powershell

In PowerShell v3, to work with WMI you can still use the old WMI cmdlets like Get-WmiObject. There is a new set of CIM cmdlets, though, that pretty...

You can use WMI to quickly find all details about your mouse and keyboard: PS> Get-WmiObject win32_PointingDevice | Where-Object { $_.Description...

In a previous tip we featured a piece of undocumented code that works in PowerShell v3 to list all built-in variables. Here is another approach that...

If you must make sure that a text has a fixed length and is neither shorter nor longer, here is the code to pad and cut the text to the desired...

Finding Built-In Variables...

In a previous tip you learned how to load additional .NET assemblies. This enables you to display dialog boxes like a MsgBox, pretty much like in...

When you want to load additional .NET assemblies to extend the types of object you can use, there are two ways of loading them: the direct .NET...

To spice up your scripts, PowerShell can use the system open file dialog, so users could easily select files to open or to parse. Here's the...

PowerShell can play WAV files, so you can add sound and special effects to your scripts (provided your system has a sound card): PS> $player =...

To access popular .NET types faster, PowerShell maintains a list of shortcuts called "type accelerators". That's why you can use the...

PowerShell automatically converts date and time information in various formats. If you'd like to know what formats are recognized by PowerShell,...

WMI represents all locally installed printers with its class Win32_Printer, so you can easily look what's installed: PS> Get-WmiObject -Class...

Sometimes, date and time information is not formatted according to the standards PowerShell understands by default. When this happens, you can...

PowerShell can access low-level COM interfaces to find out system information such as network access. This code returns a list of all active network...

When you need to log on with alternate credentials, cmdlets often pop up a login dialog, like here: $cred = Get-Credential If you wanted to run a...

Sometimes, just one line of PowerShell code gets you all the information you may have needed. There is a .NET type called NetworkInterface, for...

In a previous tip, we illustrated how to use Invoke-WmiMethod to create a network share locally and remotely. Today, you dive a bit deeper and find...

Date and Time formats are highly culture-specific, so often you need to convert date and time from one cultural format to another. That's pretty...

To create a new file share remotely, you could use the WMI class Win32_Share and its Create() method. Invoke-WmiMethod helps you run WMI methods...

In PowerShell 3.0, the (hidden) object property PSTypeNames shows you the complete inheritance tree for WMI objects: PS> $os = Get-WmiObject...

Get-WmiObject is a great and simple cmdlet to retrieve WMI information, and the parameter -List returns all available WMI class names that you can...

In a previous tip you learned how PropertySets can create groups of properties for easier access. Yet another (hidden) feature of PowerShell objects...

PropertySets are lists of properties, and PowerShell sometimes adds PropertySets to result objects to make picking the right information easier....

PowerShell can access web services and automatically retrieve information such as weather forecasts. New-WebServiceProxy does all the work for you,...

In a previous tip we explained how you read date and time information from WMI and convert it into a regular date and time information. With this...

WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation, Get-WmiObject) uses a specific (DTMF) format for date and time. You can easily convert regular date and...

With this line, you always get back the process object representing the current PowerShell host: PS>...

If you want error handler to handle specific error types, you can add the error type after the keyword trap or catch. However, this will only work...

To find popular first names for given decades, check out the function Get-PopularName. It accepts a decade between 1880 and 2000 and then uses the...

To create multi-line text in a script, you can simply enter the multi-line text into your script using quotes: $text = 'First Line Second Line...