Category: Powershell

Robert Cain quietly tells us that Powershell is a real programming language, sysadmins who claim to hate programming:

This post begins a series on using Classes in PowerShell. As a first step, we will cover the use of an Enum, as enums are frequently used in combination with classes.

An Enum is a way to provide a set of predetermined values to the end user. This allows the user to pick from a finite list, and assure a value being passed into a function or class will be valid.

Click through to learn more about enums and how they work in Powershell.

Jeffery Hicks knows what time it is (it’s clobberin’ time):

I’ve published a new project to the PowerShell Gallery. This is something that I needed, and maybe you do as well. Even though I have the typical clock running in the Windows taskbar, I have an ultrawide monitor so it isn’t always easy to read. I had been running the xclock app from WSL which was nice. But realized what I really wanted was a WPF-based clock that would display a formatted date-time string on my desktop.

Now there’s a PSClock similar to xclock, and you can check it out.

Chad Baldwin needs to send a file:

Over the years I’ve written dozens of these, one thing that often hangs me up are the “copy to SFTP” and “copy from SFTP” steps. usually what happens is I build two scripts…an “export script”, which has a manual step of “open FileZilla and upload file”, and then an Import script with another manual step to download the file.

After some Google searching to see how to handle SFTP in PowerShell, I ran into this StackOverflow answer (the creator of WinSCP) which introduced me to some cool new alternatives for dealing with FTP, FTPS, SFTP, SCP, etc using PowerShell.

Click through to see one way to do it, as well as some additional recommendations from Viewers Like You.

Andy Levy has some lessons learned:

Over the summer, I spent some (a lot of) time working on updates to a script at work which runs multiple processes in parallel. Everything seemed to work OK for a while, but then everything broke. It broke right around the time dbatools 1.1 dropped, so I started thinking that something must have changed there. Turns out, it was entirely my fault and I hope this post will help you avoid the same trap.

Don’t fall into the same traps Andy did; read the whole thing.

Patrick Gruenauer zips all the files:

Compressing files is a common task. For saving time, you can use PowerShell to automate the compression process. In this blog post I will show you how to compress multiple folders at once with the PowerShell Cmdlet Compress-Archive. The compressed zip files will be stored separately in a specific file. Let’s dive in.

Click through for a script which compresses each folder in its own zip file.

Kenneth Fisher lines ’em up and knocks ’em down:

In my last post I grabbed a file list but I really need it sorted alphabetically. Now, I’ve been a DBA my entire career and one of the things that gets hammered into you is that unless you specifically sort a list, there is no guarantee that that list will be sorted. So how do I sort my list?

To learn how and see a few examples of it in action, check out Kenneth’s post.

Robert Cain explains what providers do in Powershell:

Providers are an interesting concept in PowerShell. A provider allows us to use a standard method to communicate with different areas of your computer using the same set of commands. For example, the file system is accessed using a provider. When you use Get-ChildItem it goes through the file system provider to return a list of the files on your computer.

We’ll take a deeper look in a moment, but first let me mention that for all of the examples we’ll display the code, then under it the result of our code. In this article I’ll be using PowerShell Core, 7.1.5, and VSCode. The examples should work in PowerShell 5.1 in the PowerShell IDE, although they’ve not been tested there.

Click through for a listing of several providers and more detail on two of them.