Curated SQL Posts

Jeffrey Hicks builds a useful function:

If there’s one task I’ve never stopped doing, it is finding files. I am constantly creating new ways to organize files and display them in a meaningful format. Naturally, PowerShell is a great tool for this task. Get-ChildItem is obviously the proper starting point. The cmdlet works fine in getting only files from a folder and I can do basic early filtering by name and extension with wildcards. But my latest task was organizing files by date, and because of the way Get-ChildItem works under-the-hood, I’m going to need to resort to late filtering with Where-Object. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if this is a task I’m likely to repeat, then a PowerShell function is on the drawing board. My goal is to create a function that will display files grouped into aging buckets such as 1-week or 6-months. Even though I’m primarily concerned with age based on the last write time, I (or you) might have a need to base aging on the creation time. Let’s code.

Click through for a great walkthrough and code.

Robert Cain gets verbose on us:

In my previous post, Fun With the PowerShell Switch Parameter, I introduced the use of switches with PowerShell functions. We learned how they work, and how to create your own. For all functions, PowerShell creates a set of switches that are just “built in” to PowerShell. You do not have to explicitly create these yourself, you can simply use them and implement them within your own functions.

Two of the most used are -Verbose and -Debug. When used with the Write-Verbose and Write-Debug cmdlets they will display informational messages to the user of your functions. In this post, we’ll focus on the Verbose switch. The next post in the series will examine the Debug switch.

Click through for examples of how this can be useful.