PowerScripting Podcast – Episode 11

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.

Listen:

Introduction

• Big thanks to Shay and his PowerShell Radio post.

News

• PowerShell Community (powershellcommunity.org)
  • “Real” non-profit organization created by corporate sponsors including Microsoft, Quest, Sapien, and ShellTools.
  • Event calendar, blog hosting, forums, etc.
  • Still under construction.
• PowerShell Central (powershellcentral.com)
  • Hosted by BSonPosh and lots of help contributed by Jaykul.
  • “All PowerShell bloggers” aggregate news feed, very cool script repository, news, etc.
  • Still under construction.
• Relaunch and refocus of Powershell Live (ShellTools) as well as a new developer blog. New features in development like context menus for collections and pipelines.

Resources

• New article in Technet Mag by Don Jones on working with Regular Expressions in PowerShell.
• Another regex article: Regular Expressions in PowerShell and Perl

Tips

• Get-hVm script from Hal
  • Emits a PSCustomObject with properties (and perhaps later, methods) that represent every virtual machine which runs on one or more specified VMWare ESX host servers.
• Out-Excel script can be found on the article “Out-This, Out-That” article on the Pathalogical Scripter blog.

Cmdlet of the week

• Write-Verbose
  • Use in parameter section of functions and combine with an If statement to enable or disable verbose logging.

  Function Get-Foo {
  Param ( [switch] $Verbose )
  If ($Verbose) { $VerbosePreference = “Continue” }
  Write-Verbose “My verbose stuff goes here
  Write-Verbose “and is not seen at all unless”
  Write=Verbose “I supply the -verbose switch”
  }

One-Liners

• write-verbose “$(Get-Date -f ’s’) my log entry goes here”

Gotchas

• Problems occur when a brackets “[” are in your filenames.
  • Stamp ACL onto Directory Tree thread on Powershell Community forum
• Careful with following the $_ automatic variable by a colon
  • Out-Host “This $_:won’t work right.”
  • Out-Host “This ${_}:will.”

Thanks for listening! We love feedback and news tips, you can send them to powerscripting@gmail.com. Join our Facebook group “PowerScripting Podcast”.