Category: Powershell

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Jeffrey Hicks makes Powershell more welcoming:

I realized it had been a while since I wrote a Friday Fun post. These posts are intended to demonstrate PowerShell in a fun and often non-practical way. The end result is generally irrelevant. The PowerShell scripting techniques and concepts I use are the real takeaways. The task is nothing more than a means to an end.

Today’s project is inspired by Linux. Specifically, the WSL Ubuntu installation I run in Windows Terminal. When I first launch it, I get a welcome screen like this.

I thought, why not do something similar for PowerShell?

Read on to see the result, which looks quite nice.

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Kenneth Fisher shows us how Powershell implements subexpressions:

I’m working on a project right now where I want to add the date/time to the end of a filename. It didn’t take me long before I found a solution, and that solution lead me to subexpressions.

Click through for an example. This is indeed quite useful.

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