Category: Powershell

Max Trinidad shows how to install Powershell Core on Windows Server Core:

In the following Virtual machine scenario, I got one Server Core with Active Directory (Build 16299) and Windows 10 (Build 16299) joined to my new domain. Both Build 16299.
On my Windows client I create a shared folder named “SharedFiles”, where I copy over the latest MSI version of PowerShell Core “PowerShell-6.0.0-win-x64.msi”.

Then, on the Server Core I’m going to create a map drive to my Windows client shared folder to then run the MSI installation from Windows PowerShell Console.

He also shows how to uninstall Powershell Core, should you wish.

Tom Rayner has an example of building multiple regex matches in Powershell:

In the PowerShell Slack, I recently answered a question along these lines. Say you have a string that reads “first thing {} second thing {}” and you want to get to “first thing {0} second thing {1}” so that you can use the -f  operator to insert values into those spots. For instance…

1 2	“first thing {0} second thing {1}” –f $(get–date –format yyyy–MM–dd), $(get–random) # Will return “first thing 2018-01-10 second thing <a random number>”

The question is: how can you replace the {}’s in the string to {<current number>}?

Read on for more details.

Andrew Pruski has written a quick comparison script to check if two instances have the same set of databases or the same configuration settings:

For instance, last week I was working with two instances that contained databases part of an Always On availability group and needed to ensure that all databases on the primary were on the secondary.

Now I know there’s a few ways to do this but I needed a quick and easy method as there were over 300 dbs involved.

The method I used to do this implemented the powershell cmdlet Compare-Object

What this does is pretty much what it says on the tin. The cmdlet takes two objects and compares them based on a input property (in this case it’ll be database name).

This can turn into a much more complicated comparison, but Andrew shows that the basic concept is quite straightforward.

Mike Robbins notes that the Compare-Object cmdlet in Powershell does not like to handle null values:

I thought I’d run into a bug with the Compare-Object cmdlet in PowerShell version 5.1 earlier today.

1 2 3

$DriveLetters = (Get-Volume).DriveLetter $DriveLetters Compare-Object -ReferenceObject $DriveLetters -DifferenceObject $DriveLetters

Compare-Object : Cannot bind argument to parameter ‘ReferenceObject’ because it is null.
At line:1 char:33
+ Compare-Object -ReferenceObject $DriveLetters -DifferenceObject $Driv …
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : InvalidData: (:) [Compare-Object], ParameterBindingValidationException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : ParameterArgumentValidationErrorNullNotAllowed,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.CompareObjectCommand

Read on for the description of the problem as well as the solution.