Announcing the General Availability of IDERA SQL Safe Backup 9.3

Whenever you want PowerShell to configure or execute code automatically on launch, the code needs to go into one of four profile scripts. They really work pretty much like autoexec.bat for Windows in old days, and execute whenever PowerShell starts. You can find the...

Here is a snippet that verifies a local user account. Simply submit a username and a password. You get back either $true or $false: $username = 'Administrator' $password = 'P@ssw0rd' $computer = $env:COMPUTERNAME Add-Type -AssemblyName...

In a previous tip we talked about using PowerShell Remoting to execute code on a remote machine, and how to use "using:" to carry over local variables to the remotely executed script. However, this only works in PowerShell 3.0. If you must still use...

Get-ChildItem supports basic wildcards, but it does not support the rich feature set of regular expressions. If you combine Get-ChildItem with Where-Object, you can easily add this functionality. This example lists all DLL files found in System32 folder that start...

One common problem with enabling PowerShell Remoting on your box is public networks. As long as there are active network connection labeled as "public" or "unknown", Enable-PSRemoting will fail. Previously, you would have to manually and...

When you use PowerShell Remoting to execute scripts and commands on another machine, you may have run into an issue like this: $class = 'Win32_LogicalDisk' $ComputerName = 'storage1' Invoke-Command -ScriptBlock { Get-WmiObject -Class $class }...

If you want to replace variables in a PowerShell script, in PowerShell ISE 3.0 you can use the following function: function Replace-Variable { param( [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)] $OldName, [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)] $NewName ) $token=$null $text =...

PowershellMagazine.com has prepared a set of very useful quick reference sheets for PowerShell 3.0, the ISE editor and more. Microsoft now offers these quick reference documents for download. They are free: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30002...

In a previous tip we illustrated how you can use Start-Process to launch an elevated PowerShell from within your script to do elevated tasks. The problem with launching elevated processes is, though, that the non-elevated caller cannot monitor the elevated process. So...

Active Directory and other services sometimes use a custom GUID format. To convert a GUID to that format, all blocks of the GUID need to be reversed. In addition, the second and third block need to be exchanged. PowerShell can easily do that conversion: $sampleGUID =...

If you must make sure that a function within your script is inaccessible from outside calls, you can use this trick. Save this code as a script file, then run it: $scriptPath = $MyInvocation.MyCommand.Definition function Test { if ($MyInvocation.ScriptName -ne...

Select-String is an extremely useful cmdlet for parsing log files. You can use it to dump all lines in a text file that contain a certain keyword. This dumps all lines from windowsupdate.log with the keyword "successfully installed": Select-String -Path...

There are two ways for replacing text, and both have their advantages and pitfalls: Each string has a Replace() method which works very straightforward: Unfortunately, as you can see, the method is case-sensitive, and there is no way to change that. Alternatively, you...

PowerShell can read and also change any part of a scheduled task. Just make sure you have appropriate permissions and run PowerShell elevated. Let's assume you wanted to automatically enable or disable a task trigger for a given task. Here's a sample that...

PowerShell 3.0 does not ship with help files. Instead, they need to be downloaded separately using Update-Help. Unfortunately, PowerShell 3.0 help isn't localized, yet, and only available in English. Non-English systems refuse to use the English help files,...