Posh Tips

The Number One Best PowerShell Script on this site

xb90 — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 21:29:52 +0000

I haven’t posted anything new in a while, but I just wanted to draw attention to what I consider to be my Number One, Most Useful, Best Script on this site. Why am I bothering to do this? Because, as I analyze the traffic to this site, I see a lot of people are finding [...]

Generate Complex Passwords with PowerShell

xb90 — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 02:06:05 +0000

Here we have a simple function to generate a complex password in Windows Powershell. To Add this to YOUR script, include: The system.web assembly (add this somewhere in your script (where it will only get called once) The GenPwd function That’s all there is to it. Passwords will be 8 characters long; change the $pwdLen [...]

HowTo Make Menus in PowerShell

xb90 — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 19:49:22 +0000

If you have ever developed a user-interactive script then you are well aware of the need to provide user choices and validate input. It seems that I’ve done this hundreds of times, continuously re-inventing code that performs three simple functions: Present the user with choices Accept input from the user Validate the user’s choice To [...]

Selectively Create Program Shortcuts

xb90 — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 22:17:18 +0000

…or stated differently: How To create a PowerShell Alias that can be used to launch a Windows program from the PowerShell command prompt. I often find it convenient to run various programs directly from the PowerShell command line. In particular, I often need to run a text editor or Microsoft Excel. Using alias short-cuts, I [...]

Filtering File Listings with PowerShell

xb90 — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 20:51:29 +0000

I’ve got a real quick tip for today to demonstrate how to filter a file list using Windows PowerShell. Sample ONE: Here I want to list all *.log files that were created before today: PS C:\>get-childitem *.log |? {$_.creationtime -lt $(get-date).adddays(-1)} Note, you can replace “get-childitem” with a provided shortened alias such as “gci” or [...]

List WSUS Target Group Members with PowerShell

xb90 — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 20:40:35 +0000

Here’s a sample script that demonstrates how to use the WSUS 3.0 API to (1) list all defined computer Target Groups and (2) list of all computers subscribed to a group. Note: This script is written to utilize the default (local) WSUS server. If you wish to run it against a remote server, find the [...]

Webpage download with Timeout

xb90 — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 20:32:57 +0000

I recently encountered an issue while attempting to download a slow-loading web page where calls to the system.net.webclient class would time-out. As you may already know, the webclient class has no capability for increasing the time-out value. This functionality does exist in the slightly more complicated system.net.httpwebrequest class.

Use PowerShell to create a Scheduled Task

xb90 — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 21:11:58 +0000

In this example, we will use the command-line utility “schtasks.exe” to create a scheduled task. There are three steps involved: Create a command string Execute the command Determine status (successful or failed) If running interactively from PowerShell, either of these will work: example: schtasks.exe /Create /TN taskname /RU username /SC schedule /TR command-to-run or invoke-expression [...]

BgPing – A High Performance Bulk Ping Utility

xb90 — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 20:23:58 +0000

BgPing.ps1 is a Background Ping Script capable of pinging enormous hosts lists in record time. You could call it a Bulk Ping Script, a Mass Ping Script, a Batch Ping Script or even a Mega Ping Script but the bottom line is: this baby will crank through a lot of IP addresses (or hostnames) very [...]

GetHostInfo – Remote Host Query Script using WMI

xb90 — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 22:41:06 +0000

Here we have GetHostInfo.ps1 – a full-featured wmi query script that you can use to retrieve data from a remote (or local) machine. The script can pull details from the following WMI classes: Win32_OperatingSystem Win32_ComputerSystem Win32_NetworkAdapter plus associated Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration (this is done by associating Win32_NetworkAdapter.DeviceId with Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration.Index) Win32_LogicalDisk Win32_PhysicalMemory Win32_Processor Win32_PageFileSetting The script can also [...]