Announcing the General Availability of IDERA SQL Safe Backup 9.3

There is a COM interface that you can use to select and dump any scheduled task definition. Just make sure you are running PowerShell with full Administrator privileges. This example dumps all tasks in Task Scheduler Library\Microsoft\Windows\DiskDiagnostic: $service...

Here's a simple trick to reverse a text string: $text = 'Hello World' $text = $Text.ToCharArray() [Array]::Reverse($text) -join $text The Reverse() method is very useful to reverse the order of any array. Since texts are just character arrays, it can be...

Let's assume your script may or may not need to do a privileged operation, for example write a value to a HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE branch, depending on some prerequisites. Instead of having to run the entire script with Administrator privileges, you can run only those...

There are many ways in PowerShell to create new objects. One of the more advanced approaches uses a hash table to determine object properties and their values: $content = @{ User = $env:Username OS = (Get-WmiObject Win32_OperatingSystem).Caption BIOS = (Get-WmiObject...

If you need to know the number of files in a folder, there are different approaches with different advantages and disadvantages. The first one is using plain cmdlets and determines the number of files in the Windows folder: Get-ChildItem -Path $env:windir -Force |...

Let's assume you have a CSV file with information that you need to frequently look up. For example, the CSV file may contain server names and certain configuration settings for them. To easily look up items in your CSV file, you can turn it into a hash table....

Write-EventLog lets you write custom entries to event logs, and New-EventLog can add new event logs and event sources. Which raises the question: how can you test in advance whether a given event log or event log source exists? Here's how: # check if event log...

If you want to write plain text information to a file, don't use Out-File. Instead, use Set-Content. It is much faster: $tempfile1 = "$env:temp\tempfile1.txt" $tempfile2 = "$env:temp\tempfile2.txt" $tempfile3 =...

In a previous tip we explained how you can convert a string array into one big string. That's a prerequisite for quickly searching and replacing instances of words in a text file. This example takes windowsupdate.log and replaces all instances of "error"...

When you use Get-Content to read the content of a text file, you always get back a string array. So each line of your text file is kept separately. If you want to convert a string array into one large string, use the operator -join: $file =...

When you open a MsgBox dialog from PowerShell, the dialog window may sometimes not be visible and instead appears behind the PowerShell or ISE window. To make sure a MsgBox dialog box appears in front of your PowerShell window, try this: Add-Type -AssemblyName...

If you know the IP address and subnet mask, you can take these and calculate the broadcast address. Here's a function does it for you. Simply submit IP address and subnet mask, and receive the broadcast address: function Get-BroadcastAddress { param (...

Sometimes you may want to convert an IP address to its decimal value, for example, because you want to use binary operators to set bits. Here are two simple filters that make this a snap: filter Convert-IP2Decimal { ([IPAddress][String]([IPAddress]$_)).Address }...

To execute code in 32-bit from within a 64-bit environment (or vice versa), you can create appropriate aliases: In a 32-bit PowerShell, you create: Set-Alias Start-PowerShell64 "$env:windir\sysnative\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" And in a 64-bit...

Whenever a PowerShell script asks for credentials, PowerShell pops up a dialog box. You can view this by running this command: Get-Credential PowerShell is a console-based scripting language, and so it may be unwanted to open additional dialogs. That's why you can...

In a previous tip we showed how you can display an IPv4 address as a binary. Here's an even faster (and more cryptic) way: $ipV4 = '192.168.12.33' [Convert]::toString(([IPAddress][String]([IPAddress]$ipV4).Address).Address,2) The result looks like this:...

If you run a large Active Directory, you should use specific Active Directory cmdlets or management functions. However, if you just want to know the groups a given user account belongs to, and if the user account can also be a non-domain local account, then WMI may...

WMI represents all kinds of physical and logical entities on your machine. It also has classes that represent user accounts which include both local and domain accounts. This piece of code returns the user account of the currently logged on user: Get-WmiObject -Class...

Sometimes it may be useful to display an IPv4 address bit by bit, for example, to compare it with a subnet mask. Here's another example of just how flexible PowerShell is because it only takes one line: $ipV4 = '192.168.12.33' -join...