Category: Powershell

Jeff Hicks gives us a choice:

I’ve often told people that I spend my day in a PowerShell prompt. I run almost my entire day with PowerShell. I’ve shared many of the tools I use daily on Github. Today, I want to share another way I have PowerShell work the way I need it, with minimal effort. This specific task centers on files and folders.

As you might expect, I am constantly creating, editing, and managing files. I do all of this from a PowerShell prompt. I rarely use the start menu to find a program to launch. My challenge has always been finding the files and folders I’ve recently been using. Get-ChildItem is naturally the PowerShell tool of choice, but I’ve finally gotten around to making it work the way I need.

Not having done either of these before, I’m not sure which would be my preference, as I’d like to make sure it’s easy for me to remember later how I got to this non-standard state in case I need to replicate it elsewhere or if somebody else is at my keyboard. That’s one nice thing about the .bashrc file: it’s just there and well-known enough that people can look for changes there.

Jeff Hicks solves a challenge:

The warm-up challenge was all about manipulating strings. That alone may not sound like much. But the process of discovering how to do it and wrapping it up in a PowerShell function is where the true value lies.

Beginner Level: Write PowerShell code to take a string like ‘PowerShell’ and display it in reverse.

Intermediate Level: Take a sentence like, “This is how you can improve your PowerShell skills.” and write PowerShell code to display the entire sentence in reverse with each word also reversed. You should be able to encode and decode text. Ideally, your functions should take pipeline input. For bonus points, toggle upper and lower case when reversing the word.

Click through to see both of these solutions in action.

David Wilson takes us through debugging Powershell code in Visual Studio Code:

Microsoft has a created a great Powershell extension for VS Code that makes it easy to work with Powershell files. Once the plugin is installed you get intellisense, syntax highlighting, and even visual debugging for files that have a Powershell extension. This debugger can be easily started by pressing F5 when you’re in a Powershell script. Stopping execution on a particular line is as easy as setting a breakpoint by clicking next to a line number.

If you’re coming at debugging from Visual Studio, the VS Code is a little more complicated than what’s in Visual Studio, at least in terms of things to set up first. Once you’ve tried it out a couple of times, though, it’s a pretty convenient experience.

Jana Sattainathan has us hold our horses:

You might want to read this to the end! You are into PowerShell and have a ton of scripts. The problem is some of them run things that are not meant to be run at any time by anyone except you when you first set it up  – like dropping the entire contents of a folder and sub-folders to reinitialize.

Once you realize that you accidentally hit F5 on your “DropFolderContents.ps1” script, it is already too late. The damage is done.

Click through for several techniques to prevent this.