Category: Powershell

Patrick Gruenauer grabs the ruler:

PowerShell is very forgiving of errors. For example, if you call something that does not exist, then no error message is displayed. In this short article I want to show you how to make PowerShell a bit more strict with the strict mode.

Consider you are calling a variable that doesn’t exist. PowerShell will display no errors.

Granted, that laxity isn’t On Error Resume Next level bad, but Patrick shows us a way to toughen up the interpreter’s responses.

Chad Callihan smooshes files together:

I recently had a handful of CVS files that needed reviewed. Each CSV file was the same format, and while I could have opened them each individually to sort and review, I thought it would be much easier to combine them into one file. It was time to turn to PowerShell. Let’s look at a few examples of how PowerShell can be used to combine multiple CSV files into a single file.

A core assumption here is that the structure of each file—particularly the number of columns but also the semantic meaning of each column—is the same.

Jeffrey Hicks shares some hard-earned wisdom:

I’ve been scripting and automating things since the days of DOS 3.3, beginning with batch files. It always felt like magic. I could cast a charm simply by typing a few characters on a keyboard. Naturally, my magic skills went from batch files to VBScript to PowerShell. Throughout it all, I’ve also had an internal decision tree regarding automation. Over the years, I’ve seen IT pros new to scripting and automation needlessly struggle. Often it is due to a deficiency in their decision tree. Today, I thought I’d help you nurture yours.

There’s a lot of good advice here about where the automation inflection point is, choosing the right tool, and performing research first before trying to jump into a project.

Patrick Gruenauer counts the ways:

The enum statement can be used to declare an enumeration. Microsoft describes this statement as follows:

The enum statement allows you to create a strongly typed set of labels. That enumeration can be used in the code without having to parse or check for spelling errors.

Click through for more description, as well as an example of how to create, instantiate, and operate on enumerations.

Nicholas Xuan Nguyen doesn’t just echo to the screen:

The PowerShell Write-Output cmdlet writes objects to the output stream and displays the output of a command or message in the console. But you will be surprised how this tool makes the output more meaningful and valuable.

Read on to see what you can do with the cmdlet and why it’s better than Write-Host.