posts-powershell

You may already know about the Get-Process cmdlet, which lists all running processes, locally and remotely (use -computername for remote access)....

Sometimes, you need relative dates. What date was 14 days ago? Maybe you want to use this relative date to select files of a certain age. You can...

Get-Date not only will retrieve the current date, but you can also construct a custom date format to create time-stamped temporary file names:...

PowerShell v.2 comes with a new cmdlet called Get-Hotfix. It retrieves for you all installed hotfixes and updates. You can use it locally or...

The -as parameter is not widely known but is extremely versatile. It tries to convert data into a .NET type, and when it fails, it simply returns...

Get-WMIObject is a fantastic cmdlet to query information locally and on remote systems. Have a look: Get-Content c:\management.txt |ForEach-Object {...

How would you like to get back the big ugly block cursor you may know from Commodore 64-systems? Here is a way: $Host.UI.RawUI.CursorSize = 100...

Have you ever needed to resolve a host name to find its IP address? Simply use a .NET method and wrap it as PowerShell function: function...

When you make a function read-only, it can no longer be overwritten but you would still be able to delete the function and recreate it from scratch....

Functions by default have no write protection so they can easily be overwritten and redefined. You should do this if you'd like to make a...

When you access a database, the result is not automatically wrapped as objects so you cannot pipe the result into other cmdlets like Sort-Object or...

The easiest way of accessing databases right from PowerShell is to visit control panel and open the Data Sources (ODBC) module (which resides in...

One way to find out the owner of a process is to add the missing Owner property to process objects: $processes = Get-WmiObject Win32_Process -Filter...

Ever wanted to automatically change the Password a service uses to log on to its account? WMI has a solution. Have a look: $localaccount =...

You can easily add new properties and functions to object types using the extended type system. In this example, you append file objects with a new...

PowerShell cmdlets return objects with rich information, and to see all the information, you can pipe the result to Format-List *: Dir $env:windir |...

Select-Object can add new properties to objects and fill them with calculated content. All you need for this is a hash table with two pieces of...

Hash tables can generate "calculated" columns. All you need to do is store two pieces of information: a "label," which serves as...

There is a powerful new way in PowerShell v.2 to create new objects from scratch: You should first get yourself an empty hash table object, then add...

You may have to use alternate credentials when you connect to different systems. You’ll find that a lot of cmdlets provide the -credential...

Use the Exit statement if you run into a condition where a script should quit. The script breaks whenever you call exit from within your script. Add...

When you start using PowerShell remotely, you may run into situations like this one: Invoke-Command -ComputerName remotepc { Get-Process |...

It is sometimes necessary to dynamically create script blocks. Here is an example how and why: function Get-RemoteLog($name) { $code =...

Use Remove-Item to actually delete a registry key: function Remove-RegistryKey($key) { Remove-Item $key -Force} Use Remove-ItemProperty to delete a...

In PowerShell, you access registry keys through virtual drives like HKCU: (for HKEY_CURRENT_USER) and HKLM: (representing HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE). You...

Adding or changing registry values is not always intuitive with PowerShell. Here is a function called Set-RegistryValue that will make your life...

In PowerShell, you will need to use one of the Registry virtual drives to read from the Windows Registry as it is - not always intuitive. Here are...

You can work remotely not just for single computers. You can also run your commands against multiple computers like this: $computer = Get-Content...

When working remotely in a peer-to-peer or cross-domain scenario, you will have to add all the computers you'd like to communicate with into the...

By default, PowerShell requires Kerberos authentication to operate remotely, so you cannot use it in a simple peer-to-peer scenario. You can also...