Powershell on NewsGator Online

How to Create an Object in PowerShell

PowerShellTeam — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 02:43:01 GMT

Today someone in Xbox Live Operations (the folks that keep xBox Live alive and well) pinged me with a simple question about PowerShell with a complicated answer: “How do I create a class in PowerShell?”

There’s two scenarios I find where people want classes. The first (and most common) is familiarity: the person wants to make a class in PowerShell because they think of problems in terms of classes. The second is practical: the person wants to make a collection of properties and methods, because that’s what the pipeline in PowerShell plays nicely with (for instance, you can Group, Sort, or Select easily on properties on an object, but not as easily on a hashtable).

There are three ways you can do this with PowerShell V2 that I know of. You can using Add-Type to compile C# or other .NET languages directly, and this is the only way you can make a real class definition in PowerShell V2. You can also use New-Module with -asCustomObject to export the functions and variables within a dynamic module as a custom object, but you should be aware that complicated parameter sets do not work well as script methods. Finally, you can do things the old V1 way, which is by tacking properties and methods onto an object with the Add-Member cmdlet. Here's the same object, built in 3 different ways:

# You can compile a class with C# or other .NET languages in PowerShell v2 Add-Type @'
public class MyObject
{ public int MyField = 5; public int xTimesMyField(int x) { return x * MyField; }
}
'@ $object = New-Object MyObject $object $object.XTimesMyField(10) # You can also use -asCustomObject with the New-Module cmdlet to export a module as a class $object = New-Module { [int]$myField = 5 function XTimesMyField($x) { $x * $myField } Export-ModuleMember -Variable * -Function * } -asCustomObject $object $object.xTimesMyField(10) # You can also simply declare an object and start tacking on properties and methods with the # Add-Member cmdlet. If you use -passThru you can make one giant pipeline that adds all of the # members and assign it to a variable $object = New-Object Object | Add-Member NoteProperty MyField 5 -PassThru | Add-Member ScriptMethod xTimesMyField { param($x) $x * $this.MyField } -PassThru $object $object.xTimesMyField(10)

Hope this Helps

James Brundage [MSFT]

Custom PowerShell Cmdlets

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 04:05:30 GMT

Explore Your [Environment]

PowerShellTeam — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 23:37:27 GMT

This topic is a little long but I strongly encourage you to walk through it and master the techniques it illustrates. I can assure you that you'll will use them a couple thousand times in the next couple of years.

.Net provides a wonderful class called System.Environment that tells you all about your environment. It is well worth taking a few minutes to stop what you are doing and explore this class so that you understand its capabilities. That way when a relevant issue comes up, you'll know that there is very simple way to get the answer.

First thing to remember is that they way you specify a type in PowerShell is with square brackets:

PS> [System.Environment]

IsPublic IsSerial Name                                     BaseType
-------- -------- ----                                     --------
True     False    Environment                              System.Object

The next thing to remember is that PowerShell allows you to drop the "SYSTEM" from types:

PS> [System.Diagnostics.Process]

IsPublic IsSerial Name                                     BaseType
-------- -------- ----                                     --------
True     False    Process                                  System.ComponentModel.Component

PS> [Diagnostics.Process]

PS> [Environment]

The next thing to remember is that types can have STATIC properties and methods. What are a "static properties and methods"? Most properties are methods that you deal with are OBJECT properties and methods which is to say that they are the "properties of THAT object" or the "methods that can be invoked on THAT object". Static properties and methods do not require an object to be invoked. There are lots of reasons why programmers use statics but the thing you need to know is that it is well worth exploring static properties and methods because they often contain gems of functionality. Not all types have statics in fact most don't but those that do are often super useful so it is worth the explore.

So how do you explore? Well with PowerShell of course. Remember that PowerShell is designed to allow you to explore the system. We want to to cultivate a strong sense of curiosity about your system and want to make it easy and safe (where possible) for you to go splunking around. So the tool to explore Statics is Get-Member. Here is what you need to know:

1) Get-Member has a -STATIC parameter.
2) You can pipe INSTANCES or TYPES to get-member
3) "Get-Member -Static" can be invoked as "gm -s"

Let's explore:

PS> Get-Date |Get-Member -Static

TypeName: System.DateTime

Name            MemberType Definition
----            ---------- ----------
Compare         Method     static int Compare(System.DateTime t1, System.DateTime t2)
DaysInMonth     Method     static int DaysInMonth(int year, int month)
Equals          Method     static bool Equals(System.DateTime t1, System.DateTime t2), static bool Eq
FromBinary      Method     static System.DateTime FromBinary(long dateData)
FromFileTime    Method     static System.DateTime FromFileTime(long fileTime)
FromFileTimeUtc Method     static System.DateTime FromFileTimeUtc(long fileTime)
FromOADate      Method     static System.DateTime FromOADate(double d)
IsLeapYear      Method     static bool IsLeapYear(int year)
Parse           Method     static System.DateTime Parse(string s), static System.DateTime Parse(strin
ParseExact      Method     static System.DateTime ParseExact(string s, string format, System.IFormatP
ReferenceEquals Method     static bool ReferenceEquals(System.Object objA, System.Object objB)
SpecifyKind     Method     static System.DateTime SpecifyKind(System.DateTime value, System.DateTimeK
TryParse        Method     static bool TryParse(string s, System.DateTime&, mscorlib, Version=2.0.0.0
TryParseExact   Method     static bool TryParseExact(string s, string format, System.IFormatProvider
MaxValue        Property   static System.DateTime MaxValue {get;}
MinValue        Property   static System.DateTime MinValue {get;}
Now             Property   System.DateTime Now {get;}
Today           Property   System.DateTime Today {get;}
UtcNow          Property   System.DateTime UtcNow {get;}

PS> Get-Date |gm -s

TypeName: System.DateTime

PS> [DateTime] |gm -s

TypeName: System.DateTime

Now lets explore how you access these. You use "::" on types to invoke statics:

PS> [Datetime]::Today

Saturday, December 13, 2008 12:00:00 AM

PS> [Datetime]::IsLeapYear(2008)
True

So with that background, let's explore some of SYSTEM.ENVIRONMENT properties:

PS> [Environment] |gm -s

TypeName: System.Environment

Name                       MemberType Definition
----                       ---------- ----------
Equals                     Method     static bool Equals(System.Object o...
Exit                       Method     static System.Void Exit(int exitCode)
ExpandEnvironmentVariables Method     static string ExpandEnvironmentVar...
FailFast                   Method     static System.Void FailFast(string...
GetCommandLineArgs         Method     static System.String[] GetCommandL...
GetEnvironmentVariable     Method     static string GetEnvironmentVariab...
GetEnvironmentVariables    Method     static System.Collections.IDiction...
GetFolderPath              Method     static string GetFolderPath(System...
GetLogicalDrives           Method     static System.String[] GetLogicalD...
ReferenceEquals            Method     static bool ReferenceEquals(System...
SetEnvironmentVariable     Method     static System.Void SetEnvironmentV...
CommandLine                Property   static System.String CommandLine {...
CurrentDirectory           Property   static System.String CurrentDirect...
ExitCode                   Property   static System.Int32 ExitCode {get;...
HasShutdownStarted         Property   static System.Boolean HasShutdownS...
MachineName                Property   static System.String MachineName {...
NewLine                    Property   static System.String NewLine {get;}
OSVersion                  Property   static System.OperatingSystem OSVe...
ProcessorCount             Property   static System.Int32 ProcessorCount...
StackTrace                 Property   static System.String StackTrace {g...
SystemDirectory            Property   static System.String SystemDirecto...
TickCount                  Property   static System.Int32 TickCount {get;}
UserDomainName             Property   static System.String UserDomainNam...
UserInteractive            Property   static System.Boolean UserInteract...
UserName                   Property   static System.String UserName {get;}
Version                    Property   static System.Version Version {get;}
WorkingSet                 Property   static System.Int64 WorkingSet {get;}

PS> [Environment]::MachineName
JPSW7-5
PS> [Environment]::OSVersion

          Platform ServicePack        Version            VersionString
          -------- -----------        -------            -------------
           Win32NT                    6.1.7004.0         Microsoft Windo...

PS> [Environment]::ProcessorCount
2
PS> [Environment]::UserInteractive
True
PS> [Environment]::UserDomainName
NTDEV
PS> [Environment]::UserName
jsnover
PS> [Environment]::SystemDirectory
C:\Windows\system32
PS>

Now let's explore some methods:

PS> [Environment]::GetLogicalDrives()
C:\
D:\
E:\
PS> [Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("PATH")
%SystemRoot%\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;C:\Windows\system32;C:\Window
s;C:\Windows\System32\Wbem;C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;C:\P
rogram Files\WTT 2.2\Client\;C:\PROGRA~1\CA\SHARED~1\SCANEN~1;C:\Program Fi
les\CA\eTrust Antivirus;c:\ps
PS> [Environment]::GetFolderPath()
Cannot find an overload for "GetFolderPath" and the argument count: "0".
At line:1 char:29
+ [Environment]::GetFolderPath <<<< ()
+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [], MethodException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : MethodCountCouldNotFindBest

PS>

Notice the error I got for GetFolderPath() - it's complaining about the number of arguments it got. So now let's learn the technique to discover method signatures. If you specify a method and use "()", it invokes the method. If you don't provide the "()" and just specify the name, it give you information about the method:

PS> [Environment]::GetFolderPath

MemberType          : Method
OverloadDefinitions : {static string GetFolderPath(System.Environment+Speci
                      alFolder folder)}
TypeNameOfValue     : System.Management.Automation.PSMethod
Value               : static string GetFolderPath(System.Environment+Specia
                      lFolder folder)
Name                : GetFolderPath
IsInstance          : True

This tells you that the method takes one argument whose name is "folder" and whose type is System.Environment+SpecialFolder. What the heck is that?

PS> [System.Environment+SpecialFolder]

IsPublic IsSerial Name                                     BaseType
-------- -------- ----                                     --------
False    True     SpecialFolder                            System.Enum

Notice that it is an ENUM. The great things about ENUMS is that when you specify an invalid value - it tells you what the valid values are:

PS> [Environment]::GetFolderPath("burp")
Cannot convert argument "0", with value: "burp", for "GetFolderPath" to typ
e "System.Environment+SpecialFolder": "Cannot convert value "burp" to type
"System.Environment+SpecialFolder" due to invalid enumeration values. Speci
fy one of the following enumeration values and try again. The possible enum
eration values are "Desktop, Programs, Personal, MyDocuments, Favorites, St
artup, Recent, SendTo, StartMenu, MyMusic, DesktopDirectory, MyComputer, Te
mplates, ApplicationData, LocalApplicationData, InternetCache, Cookies, His
tory, CommonApplicationData, System, ProgramFiles, MyPictures, CommonProgra
mFiles"."
At line:1 char:29
+ [Environment]::GetFolderPath <<<< ("burp")
+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [], MethodException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : MethodArgumentConversionInvalidCastArgument

So let's try some of those values:

PS> [Environment]::GetFolderPath("cookies")
C:SERS\JSNOVER\APPDATA\ROAMING\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\COOKIES
PS> [ENVIRONMENT]::GETFOLDERPATH("MYPICTURES")
C:SERS\JSNOVER\PICTURES

BUT WAIT - IT'S GETS EVEN BETTER!

NOW LET'S PULL IT ALL TOGETHER BY REALIZING THAT ENUM IS A TYPE AND THAT IT HAS STATICS AS WELL USE THAT TO FIND ALL THE FOLDERPATHS:

PS> [ENUM] |GM -S

TYPENAME: SYSTEM.ENUM

NAME              MEMBERTYPE DEFINITION
----              ---------- ----------
EQUALS            METHOD     STATIC BOOL EQUALS(SYSTEM.OBJECT OBJA, SYST...
FORMAT            METHOD     STATIC STRING FORMAT(TYPE ENUMTYPE, SYSTEM....
GETNAME           METHOD     STATIC STRING GETNAME(TYPE ENUMTYPE, SYSTEM...
GETNAMES          METHOD     STATIC SYSTEM.STRING[] GETNAMES(TYPE ENUMTYPE)
GETUNDERLYINGTYPE METHOD     STATIC TYPE GETUNDERLYINGTYPE(TYPE ENUMTYPE)
GETVALUES         METHOD     STATIC ARRAY GETVALUES(TYPE ENUMTYPE)
ISDEFINED         METHOD     STATIC BOOL ISDEFINED(TYPE ENUMTYPE, SYSTEM...
PARSE             METHOD     STATIC SYSTEM.OBJECT PARSE(TYPE ENUMTYPE, S...
REFERENCEEQUALS   METHOD     STATIC BOOL REFERENCEEQUALS(SYSTEM.OBJECT O...
TOOBJECT          METHOD     STATIC SYSTEM.OBJECT TOOBJECT(TYPE ENUMTYPE...

PS> [ENUM]::GETVALUES([SYSTEM.ENVIRONMENT+SPECIALFOLDER])
DESKTOP
PROGRAMS
PERSONAL
PERSONAL
FAVORITES
STARTUP
RECENT
SENDTO
STARTMENU
MYMUSIC
DESKTOPDIRECTORY
MYCOMPUTER
TEMPLATES
APPLICATIONDATA
LOCALAPPLICATIONDATA
INTERNETCACHE
COOKIES
HISTORY
COMMONAPPLICATIONDATA
SYSTEM
PROGRAMFILES
MYPICTURES
COMMONPROGRAMFILES

PS> FOREACH ($F IN [ENUM]::GETVALUES([SYSTEM.ENVIRONMENT+SPECIALFOLDER])) {
>> "{0,-20} - {1}" -F $F, [ENVIRONMENT]::GETFOLDERPATH($F) }
>>
DESKTOP              - C:SERS\JSNOVER\DESKTOP
PROGRAMS             - C:SERS\JSNOVER\APPDATA\ROAMING\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\S
TART MENU\PROGRAMS
PERSONAL             - C:SERS\JSNOVER\DOCUMENTS
PERSONAL             - C:SERS\JSNOVER\DOCUMENTS
FAVORITES            - C:SERS\JSNOVER\FAVORITES
STARTUP              - C:SERS\JSNOVER\APPDATA\ROAMING\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\S
TART MENU\PROGRAMS\STARTUP
RECENT               - C:SERS\JSNOVER\APPDATA\ROAMING\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\R
ECENT
SENDTO               - C:SERS\JSNOVER\APPDATA\ROAMING\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\S
ENDTO
STARTMENU            - C:SERS\JSNOVER\APPDATA\ROAMING\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\S
TART MENU
MYMUSIC              - C:SERS\JSNOVER\MUSIC
DESKTOPDIRECTORY     - C:SERS\JSNOVER\DESKTOP
MYCOMPUTER           -
TEMPLATES            - C:SERS\JSNOVER\APPDATA\ROAMING\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\T
EMPLATES
APPLICATIONDATA      - C:SERS\JSNOVER\APPDATA\ROAMING
LOCALAPPLICATIONDATA - C:SERS\JSNOVER\APPDATAOCAL
INTERNETCACHE        - C:SERS\JSNOVER\APPDATAOCAL\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\TEM
PORARY INTERNET FILES
COOKIES              - C:SERS\JSNOVER\APPDATA\ROAMING\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\C
OOKIES
HISTORY              - C:SERS\JSNOVER\APPDATAOCAL\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\HIS
TORY
COMMONAPPLICATIONDATA - C:\PROGRAMDATA
SYSTEM               - C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32
PROGRAMFILES         - C:\PROGRAM FILES
MYPICTURES           - C:SERS\JSNOVER\PICTURES
COMMONPROGRAMFILES   - C:\PROGRAM FILES\COMMON FILES

IS THAT COOL OR WHAT?

ENJOY!

JEFFREY SNOVER [MSFT]
WINDOWS MANAGEMENT PARTNER ARCHITECT
VISIT THE WINDOWS POWERSHELL TEAM BLOG AT: HTTP://BLOGS.MSDN.COM/POWERSHELL
VISIT THE WINDOWS POWERSHELL SCRIPTCENTER AT: HTTP://WWW.MICROSOFT.COM/TECHNET/SCRIPTCENTER/HUBS/MSH.MSPX

PowerShell ATE

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 22:55:23 GMT

First session on Ask the Experts this morning and what fascinated me was the number of people asking "what is PowerShell and what can I do with it?" Two years since version 1 shipped and the amount that has been written about PowerShell and this came as a bit of a surprise. So to answer the question:

PowerShell is Microsoft's automation engine. It is part of the Common Engineering Criteria which means that it will be built into all major Microsoft products. It is already in Exchange 2007, SQL Server 2008, Windows 2008 and large parts of the System Center family. Recent announcements regarding the new functionality in Windows 2008 R2 raise PowerShell's profile to a whole new level. It is installed and on by default in Windows 7\2008 R2 (except server core where it is optional)

PowerShell is usually exposed as a command shell and scripting language though it can be incorporated into applications.

PowerShell provides a method of increasing administrator productivity that hasn't existed before in the Windows environment. If you want to be regarded as a top techie in the Windows world - learn PowerShell.

To misquote. The future's here. The future's PowerShell.

Share this post :

Technorati Tags: Powershell

PowerShell, WMI and formatting

jamesone — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 12:25:00 GMT

I’ve been doing a ton of PowerShell recently, in which is part of the reason why the number of blog posts I’ve made has been down. One of the jobs has been to go back to some of the code I wrote a while back and examine how I handle WMI objects. At the time I wrote my contribution to the OCS resource kit last year I was pretty new to PowerShell and I wish I knew what I know now before I started.

Actually where I started with OCS and PowerShell was looking at someone else’s code where they had for loop with a bunch of write-host statements to output WMI objects to the screen. I said “don’t be daft, use | format-table” and the next thing I knew I was being asked to bring my obvious expertise to bear on the project (A Polite form of “if you’re so clever you do it then” ). So I started with a Bunch of get-thing functions. These would be in the form Get-WMIObject –Class Thing | format table. I quickly realised that wasn’t right because once it is formatted as a table you can’t use the object. So for every class of “thing” I made the get-thing function return the WMI object(s) and had a list-thing function. One of the testers didn’t like the unformatted WMI objects if he used get- instread of list and I told him that was just how things had to be.

Lets move forward to recent history. I was looking at the Get-process function in PowerShell, when you run it it looks like this.

PS C:\Users\jamesone\Documents\windowsPowershell> get-process -Name winword  
Handles  NPM(K)    PM(K)      WS(K) VM(M)   CPU(s)     Id ProcessName  
-------  ------    -----      ----- -----   ------     -- -----------  
    931     123    85380     149360   506 ...86.16    264 WINWORD

Only one thing wrong with that – if you send it to get-member you see it is a “System.Diagnostics.Process” object but those properties “NPM(K)” and the rest the don’t exist. Curious. I already knew PowerShell has some XML files which let me spot-weld properties onto objects, so I went for a little search using my favourite function Select-String.

PS C:\Users\jamesone\Documents\windowsPowershell> cd $pshome

PS C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0> select-string -path *.ps1xml -simplematch "System.Diagnostics.Process" 
DotNetTypes.format.ps1xml:370:                <TypeName>System.Diagnostics.ProcessModule</TypeName> 
DotNetTypes.format.ps1xml:404:                <TypeName>System.Diagnostics.Process</TypeName>
DotNetTypes.format.ps1xml:405:                <TypeName>Deserialized.System.Diagnostics.Process</TypeName>

DotNetTypes.format.ps1xml:551:                <TypeName>System.Diagnostics.Process</TypeName>

DotNetTypes.format.ps1xml:598:                <TypeName>System.Diagnostics.Process</TypeName>

DotNetTypes.format.ps1xml:1090:                <TypeName>System.Diagnostics.Process</TypeName>

types.ps1xml:133:        <Name>System.Diagnostics.ProcessModule</Name>

types.ps1xml:327:        <Name>System.Diagnostics.Process</Name>

types.ps1xml:430:        <Name>Deserialized.System.Diagnostics.Process</Name>

The files themselves are signed so they shouldn’t be changed, but you can look at them.

In Types.Ps1XML there is a section starting at line 327 which defines the “spot-welded” properties. Have a look at a process in you’ll see alias properties like “NPM” which aren’t part of the definition of the .NET object, that’s where they come from.

In DotNetTypes.format.ps1xml there is a section which describes how the object should be formatted, table or list, column widths and headings, and properties or code blocks. It’s all written up on MSDN. So I could use this as the basis for my own XML file: load that using Update-FormatData and… job done.

The gist of the XML file is it looks like this

<Configuration>

    <ViewDefinitions>  
     </ViewDefinitions>  
</Configuration>

Inside viewDefinitions there are one or more <view> objects. Which look like this, the key piece is the name of the type, as you can see this one is for a virtual machine in Hyper-V, and this one is formatted using a table.

  <View>
    <Name>Msvm_ComputerSystem</Name>

    <ViewSelectedBy>
      <TypeName>System.Management.ManagementObject#root\Virtualization\Msvm_ComputerSystem</TypeName>
    </ViewSelectedBy>
     <TableControl>
       <TableHeaders>
      </TableHeaders>
       <TableRowEntries>
          <TableRowEntry>
          </TableRowEntry>
        </TableRowEntries>
     </TableControl>
   </View>

The Table headers section contains one entry for each column

  <TableColumnHeader>
    <Label>Up-Time (mS)</Label>
    <Width>12</Width>
    <Alignment>left</Alignment>
  </TableColumnHeader>

And the TableRowEntry section contains a corresponding entry

  <TableColumnItem>
    <PropertyName>OnTimeInMilliseconds</PropertyName>
  </TableColumnItem>

If I wanted to have the time in seconds here I could use a script block instead of a property name

  <TableColumnItem> 
    <ScriptBlock>$_.OnTimeInMilliseconds / 1000<ScriptBlock> 
  </TableColumnItem>

I’m not going pretend that putting the XML together is as quick as writing a list function – but it definitely seems worth it.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Windows,PowerShell,Formatting,XML

Some advice on creating Powershell scripts

admin — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 09:51:17 GMT

Creating a Powershell script CAN be quite difficult. How to get the output you want? Where to start? Let me try to get you started by providing a structure you can follow. I’m not saying this is THE way, but it’s MY way. Hope it helps you and please do comment if you have additions or another way!

First: Scripts for gathering information.

1. What should my OUTPUT be?
It’s easier to start with the end. Start by determining what you would like your output to look like.

1.1 OBJECTS representing what?
It’s good practise generating objects as output. It allows you to use the full power of Powershell to further manipulate your output. So don’t use any Format-… cmdlets in your scripts! That being said, what should the output objects represent?
Let’s take a simple example, like generating an overview of server OS versions or free disk space or something similar. The output objects should represent the servers.

1.2 What PROPERTIES?
You all know objects have properties. If not, read Get-Help About_Object. What properties of the server objects are we interested in? In the example it could be Server Name (obviously), OS Version, Service Pack, Free Disk Space on C-partition, and so on.

2. WHERE to get the information?
Now that we know what objects to create and what properties to fill, let’s examine where to get all this info.

2.1 The EASY ones.
When the properties can all be found in one place, the script is simple. For example, the OS Version and Service Pack of a server, can all be found in Active Directory. The Quest AD cmdlet Get-QADComputer returns objects representing servers, which have properties including the ones we seek. All we have to do is FILTER the properties, like so:
Get-QADComputer | Select-Object Name, OSName, OSServicePack

And we’re all done!

2.2 Getting HARDER:
What if most properties can be found in this way, but some require additional calculations or “get-”ting? Then we can use CALCULATED PROPERTIES. The syntax is as follows:
Get-Something | Select-Object Name, @{N=”CalculatedPropertyName”;E={EXPRESSION THAT RETURNS THE DESIRED VALUE}}
For example, you want to get several properties of a harddisk, but one value should be converted from bytes to GB:
Get-WmiObject Win32_LogicalDisk | Select-Object DeviceID, @{N=”GBFreeSpace”;E={$_.FreeSpace/1GB}}

2.3 The CHALLENGE:
The most difficult scripts gather information from all over the place. But you’d still like to present it in a simple and convenient manner. This is when you should build your own output objects and create the properties yourself. In order to get this done for multiple objects in a collection, it is vital you loop through a collection of objects representing the same thing as your output objects. Consider the following example:
Let’s say you want to get some exotic characteristics for all your vm’s. For instance which server it is running on, the last 5 events that occurred and the average memory usage. These aren’t properties of any vm object you can get. So start by looping through all the vm objects you can get, but not before you create an empty collection to old your output objects:
$myCol = @()
$VC = Connect-VIServer MYVCSERVER
$vms = Get-VM
ForEach ($vm in $vms)
{
Then, inside the loop, create a custom output object along with the properties you’d like to see:
$myObj = “” | Select Name, Host, LatestEvents, AvgMemUsage
Then you can start calculating or “get-”ting the proper values for each of these properties. For example:
$myObj.Name = $vm.Name
$myObj.Host = ($vm | Get-VMHost).Name
$myObj.LatestEvents = ($vm | Get-Event | Select-Object -Last 5)
$myObj.AvgMemUsage = ($vm | Get-Stat -Memory -MaxSamples 1).Value
(These examples are off the top of my head and untested.)
Finally, add your output object to the collection and close the loop:
$myCol += $myObj
}

Next time: Scripts that actually change values or perform some other action. Stay tuned.
Hugo

BSonPoSH » Using Switch -RegEx to create Custom Object (Getting HBA Info)

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:12:41 GMT

PowerShell Team Blog : Programmatic way to get valid string values for a parameter

halr9000 — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 01:36:02 GMT

The attributes provide a programmable way to discover the capabilities of the cmdlet. This can be used in all sorts of wonderful ways - e.g. autogenerating GUI front end to the cmdlets.

Bookmark this on Delicious - Saved by halr9000 to powershell scripting advanced powerscripting todo tips - More about this bookmark

Microcode: PowerShell Scripting Trick - Writing functions that use the pipeline or take arguments

JamesBrundage — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 20:01:21 GMT

I was cleaning up some scripts for posting when I happened upon this minor trick. I had a function that was using $input, a PowerShell v1 feature that allows you to use pipelined values within a function. This enables you to do basic pipelining with PowerShell v1, but it can make code more complex if you want to handle the same item as one or more positional parameters.

Here's a simplified example:

function Add-Number() {
    begin { $total = 0 }
    process {
        foreach ($in in $input + $args) {
            # Expand once more to handle lists of lists
            foreach ($i in $in) {
                $total+=$i
            }
        }
    }
    end { $total }
}

This snippet of code allows your V1 functions to act significantly more like cmdlets will, without needing to use PowerShell CTP2.

It makes

1..5 | Add-Number

work the same as:

Add-Number (1..5)

and the same as:

Add-Number 1 2 3 4 5

Since every item in PowerShell is an object, you can also easily check for types at any point, which allows you to respond to multiple types of objects in a pipeline. This simple trick makes it much easier to build V1 functions that have most of the flexibility of cmdlets.

Hope this helps,

James Brundage

Check NIC bind order | PeetersOnline.nl

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:47:15 GMT

Using PowerShell to make sure your XP machine is defragmented

jaredpar — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:00:15 GMT

Quick script you can run at login to ensure that your XP machine is being defragmented. I chose 1:00 AM every evening but you can quickly alter that in the script. I have this script run as part of my regular set of configuration scripts to ensure that my XP machines are in good shape.

$script:title = "Xp Regular Degrag"
if ( 5 -ne [Environment]::OsVersion.Version.Major ) {
return;
}
$found = schtasks /query | ?{ $_ -match "^\w*$title" } | test-any
if ( $found ) {
return
}
# Set up the defrag task
$task = "{0} {1}" -f (join-path $env:WinDir "System32\defrag.exe"),$env:SystemDrive
schtasks /create /ru system /tn $title /sc daily /st "01:00:00" /tr $task

Windows PowerShell : $MindWarpingPower = $Cmdlets + $ScriptBlock_Parameters

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 10:30:34 GMT

Find Exceptional Mailboxes in Exchange Environment

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:02:02 GMT

In Exchange 2003, we are using Active Directory Users & Computers to find some of the exceptional users/mailboxes up to certain level (may be with custom LDAP query) in the environment but in Exchange 2007 Management Console we have certain limitations to find it but there PowerShell helps you. In Exchange 2007 Management Console we can filter recipients for below attributes and values are matching, available or unavailable. ActiveSynch Mailbox Policy Alias City Company Countr

Writing Better Script Functions for the PowerShell Pipeline

Tue, 13 May 2008 01:18:23 GMT

Windows PowerShell

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:22:31 GMT

20080424

WindowsDevCenter.com -- Top 10 Tips for Using Windows PowerShell

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:39:32 GMT

Virtual machine copying with PowerShell

neil — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 02:14:56 GMT

Believe it or not, PowerShell is more than just fun and games. You can even do productive things with it! A common scenario I run into is the need to create a new virtual machine. Usually I want to base it on one I’ve already created and I want it to join a domain. There are a couple issues that I run in to:

Duplicate SID Error
Too many clicks

The first problem can be solved with a free tool that Microsoft has released called NewSID. Running that will give my virtual a unique SID so that it can be added to the domain.

Now for the second problem..too many clicks! Renaming a machine and adding it to the domain takes almost 2 minutes and a nearly infinite number of clicks and keystrokes…or maybe not. At any rate, it’d be great to simplify this process. Enter PowerShell.
Rename a Computer and Join Domain

$comp = get-wmiobject Win32_ComputerSystem 
$comp.Rename(“newComputerName”,”password”,”administrator”) 
$comp.JoinDomainOrWorkGroup(“MYDOMAIN”,”domainPassword”,”MYDOMAINdomainAdmin”,$null,3)

Add a call to NewSID, wrap those delicious lines in a function and you are well on your way to renaming a virtual and joining a domain in fewer keystrokes. Its so easy you might even find yourself creating new virtuals just to run it again.

Windows PowerShell 1.0 - In Action

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 21:35:11 GMT

This is a three part series; Part 1 looks at how to process, search, and manipulate strings and unstructured text using the .NET string object and regular expressions; Part 2 focuses on file processing; Part 3 looks at working with XML in PowerShell....

Windows PowerShell 1.0 - SDK

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 19:54:02 GMT

The Windows PowerShell Software Development Kit (SDK) is now available as part of Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, and Windows XP. ...

A collection of LDAP Filter Info

Brandon — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 01:25:50 GMT

I often find myself googling for LDAP filter info. This time I decided to post the resulting set of websites I hit for this info.

NOTE: MS release the Specs for Active Directory's LDAP Compliance here. GREAT DOC!
http://download.microsoft.com/download/d/c/8/dc83e0b8-fc2c-4af4-bd27-45b5963ad98d/AD%20LDAP%20Compliance.doc

Blog Entry on LDAP Filters
-------------------------
http://bsonposh.com/modules/wordpress/?p=78

LDAP Filter Articles
-------------------
query Active Directory by using a bitwise filter
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/269181

Search Filter Syntax
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa746475.aspx

Mastering the LDAP search filter
http://searchwinit.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid1_gci1191071,00.html

userAccountControl
-------------------
UserAccountControl flags
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305144

User-Account-Control Attribute (Windows)
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms680832.aspx

Using Switch -RegEx to create Custom Object (Getting HBA Info)

Brandon — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 22:22:42 GMT

The other day I had a need to collect HBA (Host Base Fiber Adapters) from all my Servers. So the first place I looked was at WMI, but unfortunately... no dice. It didnt have the information I needed. The only way I knew to get the info I needed was to use was HBACmd.exe (utility to collect HBA information remotely.) So I went to writing a wrapper script in powershell to call the exe and then grep the text for what I was looking for, but I thought... HEY! Thats not the powershell thing to do! We do objects not text. So I went to parsing the text and making an object out of it. The script below is the result and while I dont believe many of you will find it particularly useful as it has a VERY specific use, I wanted to share with you how I went about objectizing the output.

Here is a littel Q and A on the script

Q: Purpose?
A: To get all the HBA information include Type, Firmware, Bios, Target Lun, WWN and a slew of other stuff.

Q: Why Did I objectize my text?
A: Because I know can simply use properties to filter and output data. Like what Machines have what Bios and what type of HBAs they have. Before I would have the parse the text for every different senario... now I just use where-object and filter away.

I few things that I wanted to point out here are the use of Switch to create the Custom Objects. IMO, Switch is one of the most powerful commands in the Powershell Language. It is INSANELY Powerfull. To be honest, It is pretty much the only one you need.

To compare it "Select Case" in vbscript would be insulting, but it can peform a similar function Like

switch ($a){
     Value1    {"It was Value 1"}
     Value2    {"It was Value 2"}
     Value3    {"It was Value 3"}
     Value4    {"It was Value 4"}
}
 

It would take a whole series of post to completely cover switch, but for this one I only want to go over -regex use. For complete use read the help located:
PS> Get-help About_Switch # Read it, Learn it, Love it

Some Quick Notes about Switch
- Can use RegEx, WildCard, Exact, CaseSensitive, or File options.
- It takes input via Pipeline {expression} or File. The cool thing is the pipeline can be any expression that results in piped output.
- For each match it can perform any ScritpBlock use $_ as the current Item
- It performs EVERY match on each element unless you use Continue after a match to stop processing that record

Like I said, Switch is insanely powerful. Just one of those powers is using RegEx for comparison.

Here is an example of using the -RegEx option

switch -RegEx (Get-ChildItem C:\test)
{
    "^\d"                  {"Starts with number:          " + $_.FullName}
    "\d"                   {"Has a number in it:          " + $_.FullName}
    "[^A-Za-z]"            {"Does NOT start with Number:  " + $_.FullName}
    "tmp"                  {"Has 'tmp' in it:             " + $_.FullName}
    # Notice that you can even use and expression to match
    {$_.Mode -match "-a"}  {"Has Archive Bit Set:         " + $_.FullName}
}
 

Now.. lets look at the script below. You will noticed I used RegEx to decide what value gets put in to what property of the object.

The script converts the output of three commands into two different objects. Lets look at one of them

It takes text like This

Manageable HBA List
 
Port WWN   : 10:00:00:00:11:11:11:11
Node WWN   : 20:00:00:00:11:11:11:11
Fabric Name: 00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00
Flags      : 0000f0a5
Host Name  : Server1
Mfg        : Emulex Corporation
 
Port WWN   : 10:00:00:00:22:22:22:22
Node WWN   : 20:00:00:00:22:22:22:22
Fabric Name: 00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00
Flags      : 0000f0a5
Host Name  : Server1
Mfg        : Emulex Corporation
 

And converts Into an object like This

   TypeName: System.Management.Automation.PSCustomObject
 
Name        MemberType   Definition
----        ----------   ----------
Equals      Method       System.Boolean Equals(Object obj)
GetHashCode Method       System.Int32 GetHashCode()
GetType     Method       System.Type GetType()
ToString    Method       System.String ToString()
Fabric      NoteProperty System.String Fabric=00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00
Flags       NoteProperty System.String Flags=0000f0a5
HBADetail   NoteProperty System.Object[] HBADetail=System.Object[]
Host        NoteProperty System.String Host=Server1
LUN         NoteProperty System.String LUN=01
MFG         NoteProperty System.String MFG=Emulex Corporation
NodeWWN     NoteProperty System.String NodeWWN=20:00:00:00:11:11:11:11
PortWWN     NoteProperty System.String PortWWN=10:00:00:00:11:11:11:11
 

Here is the Script

Param($List,$HostName,[switch]$FullDetail,[switch]$Verbose)
Begin{
    $erroractionpreference = "SilentlyContinue"
    $HBACMDPath = "<Path To HbaCmd.exe>"
    function CreateHBAListObj{
        Param($srv)
        $objCol = @()
        $result = &"$HBACMDPath" "h=$srv" ListHBAs
        foreach($item in $result)
        {
            $parsd = $item.split([string[]](": "),[system.StringSplitOptions]::RemoveEmptyEntries)
            switch -regex ($parsd[0])
            {
                "^Port" {   
                            $myobj = "" | Select-Object Host,PortWWN,NodeWWN,Fabric,Flags,LUN,MFG
                            $myobj.PortWWN = $parsd[1]
                            $myobj.Lun = GetTargetLun $srv $myobj.PortWWN
                        }
                "^Node" {$myobj.NodeWWN = $parsd[1]}
                "^Fabr" {$myobj.Fabric  = $parsd[1]}
                "^Flag" {$myobj.Flags   = $parsd[1]}
                "^Host" {$myobj.Host    = $parsd[1]}
                "^MFG " {
                            $myobj.MFG     = $parsd[1]
                            $objCol += $myObj
                        }
            }
        }
        $objCol 
    }
    function CreateHBAInfoObj{
        Param($srv,$wwn)
        $objCol = @()
        $result = &"$HBACMDPath" "h=$srv" HBAAttrib $wwn
        
        $myobj = "" |Select-Object Host,MFG,SN,Model,ModelDesc,NodeWWN,NodeSymname,
                                   HWVersion,ROM,FW,VenderID,Ports,DriverName,DeviceID,HBAType,
                                   OpFW,SLT1FW,SLT2FW,IEEEAddress,BootBios,DriverVer,KernelVer
        foreach($item in $result)
        {
            $parsd = $item.split([string[]](": "),[system.StringSplitOptions]::RemoveEmptyEntries)
            switch -regex ($parsd[0])
            {
                "^Host"         {$myobj.Host         = $parsd[1]}
                "^Manufacturer" {$myobj.MFG          = $parsd[1]}
                "^Serial"       {$myobj.Sn           = $parsd[1]}
                "^Model  "      {$myobj.Model        = $parsd[1]}
                "^Model Desc"   {$myobj.ModelDesc    = $parsd[1]}
                "^Node WWN "    {$myobj.NodeWWN      = $parsd[1]}
                "^Node Symname" {$myobj.NodeSymname  = $parsd[1]}
                "^HW"           {$myobj.HWVersion    = $parsd[1]}
                "^Opt"          {$myobj.ROM          = $parsd[1]}
                "^FW"           {$myobj.FW           = $parsd[1]}
                "^Vender"       {$myobj.VenderID     = $parsd[1]}
                "^Number"       {$myobj.Ports        = $parsd[1]}
                "^Driver Name"  {$myobj.DriverName   = $parsd[1]}
                "^Device"       {$myobj.DeviceID     = $parsd[1]}     
                "^HBA Type"     {$myobj.HBAType      = $parsd[1]}
                "^Operational"  {$myobj.OpFW         = $parsd[1]}
                "^SLI1 FW"      {$myobj.SLT1FW       = $parsd[1]}
                "^SLI2 FW"      {$myobj.SLT2FW       = $parsd[1]}
                "^IEEE"         {$myobj.IEEEAddress  = $parsd[1]}
                "^Boot "        {$myobj.BootBios     = $parsd[1]}
                "^Driver Ver"   {$myobj.DriverVer    = $parsd[1]}
                "^Kernel "      {$myobj.KernelVer    = $parsd[1]
                                 $objCol += $myObj}
            }
        }
        $objCol 
    }    
    function GetTargetLun{
        Param($srv,$wwn)
        $objCol = @()
        $result = &"$HBACMDPath" "h=$srv" TargetMapping $wwn
        [int]$lun = 0
        switch -regex ($result)
        {
            "^SCSI OS Lun" {$lun = $_.split([string[]](": "),[system.StringSplitOptions]::RemoveEmptyEntries)[1].trim()}
        }
        "{0:x}" -f $lun
    }
    function Ping-Server {
        Param([string]$srv)
        if($srv -eq ""){return $false}
        $pingresult = Get-WmiObject win32_pingstatus -f "address='$srv'"
        if($pingresult.statuscode -eq 0) {$true} else {$false}
    }
    Write-Host
    if($verbose){$VerbosePreference = "Continue"}
}
Process{
    if($_)
    {
        Write-Host "Getting HBA Info from $_"
        if($FullDetail)
        {
            $MyObject = CreateHBAListObj $_
            $HBADetail = $MyObject | %{CreateHBAInfoObj $_.Host $_.PortWWN}
            $MyObject | add-Member -Name HBADetail -type NoteProperty -Value $HBADetail -force
            $MyObject
        }
        else
        {
            $MyObject = CreateHBAListObj $_
            $MyObject
        }
    }
}
End{
    if($list)
    {
        $servers = Get-Content $list
        Write-Host "Running HBA Check against Servers in $list"
        foreach($server in $servers)
        {
            if($server -ne "")
            {
                if(ping-server $server)
                {
                    Write-Host "Getting HBA Info from $server"
                    if($FullDetail)
                    {
                        $MyObject = CreateHBAListObj $server
                        $HBADetail = $MyObject | %{CreateHBAInfoObj $_.Host $_.PortWWN}
                        $MyObject | add-Member -Name HBADetail -type NoteProperty -Value $HBADetail -force
                        $MyObject
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        $MyObject = CreateHBAListObj $server
                        $MyObject
                    }
                }
                else
                {
                    Write-Host "$Server not Pingable `n" -foregroundcolor RED
                }
            }
        }
    }
    if($HostName)
    {
        Write-Host "Running HBA Check against Servers in $HostName"
        if(ping-server $HostName)
        {
            Write-Host "Getting HBA Info from $HostName"
            if($FullDetail)
            {
                $MyObject = CreateHBAListObj $HostName
                $HBADetail = $MyObject | %{CreateHBAInfoObj $_.Host $_.PortWWN}
                $MyObject | add-Member -Name HBADetail -type NoteProperty -Value $HBADetail -force
                $MyObject
            }
            else
            {
                $MyObject = CreateHBAListObj $HostName
                $MyObject
            }
        }
        else
        {
            Write-Host "$HostName not Pingable `n" -foregroundcolor RED
        }
    }
    Write-Host
}
 

The Power of -f. The Format Operator

Brandon — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 02:22:26 GMT

This is from a NG post discussing the -f Operator… I thought it was a pretty good description. Compliments to Kiron.

Q: What is the -f operator

A: PowerShell’s Format Operator ‘-f’ is equivalent to .Net’s Composite
Formatting. The syntax is:
{index[,alignment][:formatString]} -f listOfValues

Composite Formatting
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/txafckwd(vs.71).aspx

Quoting from about_operator:
Format Operator “-f”
The format operator provides support for formatting strings via the .NET
string object format method. On the left hand side of the operator is the
format string and on the right hand of the operator is the collection of
objects to be formatted.
The following example shows some of the capabilities of the format operator.
PS> “{0} {1,-10} {2:N}” -f 1,”hello”,[math]::pi
1 hello 3.14

Some samples:

# the ‘|’ is for demonstrating the alignment
"{0:(###) ###-####}" -f 2224445555 # phone number
"{0:hh:mm:ss tt}" -f (get-date) # time, 12 hour format
"{0:HH:mm:ss}" -f (get-date) # time, 24 hour format
"{0:p4}" -f (1/3) # percent with four decimal places
"{0:c2}" -f (1724.87 * 12) # currency with two decimal places
"|{0,22:c2}|" -f (1724.87 * 12) # right aligned currency with two decimal places
"|{0,-22:n2}|" -f (13/57) # left aligned number with two decimal places
"{0:MM dd yy}" -f (get-date) # date, custom short format
"{0:MMMM yyyy}" -f (get-date) # date, ‘month year’ format
0..15 | % {"{0:0##}" -f $_} # filled number format
0..15 | % {"|{0,33}|" -f "Number $_"} # right aligned string
0..15 | % {"|{0,-33}|" -f "Number $_"} # left aligned string
0..15 | % {"|{0,33}|  |{0,-33}|" -f "Number $_"} # right & left aligned string

Update to GPMC Cmdlets!

gpoguy — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 21:58:35 GMT

Well, we've updated our free SDM Software GPMC PowerShell cmdlets (registration optional)! We are now up to 16 cmdlets! Cool. Here's what we've added:

Added the –DomainName parameter to all cmdlets as appropriate to allow you to perform operations against domains other than the one the cmdlets run in
Added 4 new cmdlets, including:

Import-SDMgpo: provides support for the GPMC Import function that allows you to import a GPMC backup into a GPO. This is often used for migration of GPOs from test to production domains/forests.
Get-SDMSOMSecurity: provides a list of GP-related permissions on a given SOM (Scope of Management, i.e. site, domain or OU)
Add-SDMSOMSecurity: lets you add GP-related permissions (e.g. create GPO, link GPO, RSOP logging and planning) to a given SOM
Remove-SDMSOMSecurity: lets you remove GP-related permissions from a given SOM

If you installed the 1.0 version, just uninstall that and install this new setup. Note that the snap-in name has changed to SDMSoftware.PowerShell.GPMC.

To get a full list of the GPMC cmdlets, type this at a PowerShell command prompt:

get-command *sdm* -type cmdlet

All the cmdlets also include help, so just use get-help <cmdlet name> to find out the correct syntax.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Tags:

PowerShell, Group Policy, SDM Software, GPMC

DevConnections - PowerShell for SharePoint Developers

neil — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 05:36:22 GMT

My final presentation at SharePoint Connections was the one I’d been looking forward to the most. I’m a big fan of using PowerShell and SharePoint together, it was great to show a crowd some of the thing they could do. I’d done a couple hour PowerShell presentations (that always seemed to run long) before, but never with SharePoint. The challenge this time was to do them both together…in an hour. I was able to get through everything I’d planned and now I have some more detailed content that didn’t fit into the presentation that I can put into some future posts.

The deck is now uploaded, and as promised, you didn’t miss out if you couldn’t write down all my commands. Nearly all of the commands are here, incorrect statements and all. I also have my profile, so you can see how I cheated in my other presentations.

I also made a basic PowerShell Types (ps1xml) file to demonstrate the how to extend familiar types to make them easier to work with. You can grab the file and use it in your own development environment, though I probably wouldn’t rely on it in production quite yet. Remember to get it started you need to:

Update-TypeData -prepend JustAddCode.Types.ps1xml

Virtual machine copying with PowerShell

neil — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 02:14:56 GMT

Duplicate SID Error
Too many clicks

The first problem can be solved with a free tool that Microsoft has released called NewSID. Running that will give my virtual a unique SID so that it can be added to the domain.

$comp = get-wmiobject Win32_ComputerSystem 
$comp.Rename(“newComputerName”,”password”,”administrator”) 
$comp.JoinDomainOrWorkGroup(“MYDOMAIN”,”domainPassword”,”MYDOMAINdomainAdmin”,$null,3)

Using Powershell to Mail-Enable an AD User without CDOEXM

Gaurhoth — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 00:39:00 GMT

Over on microsoft.public.windows.powershell, it’s been asked how to mail-enable an AD user in an Exchange 2003 Environment. The MS supported way involves CDOEXM (part of Exchange System Manager) which seems to be rather difficult to use from powershell.

In reality, you can usually get away with using [ADSI] to modify several key attributes on the AD user and let RUS initailize the remaining attributes to create the mail-enabled user.

Here’s the example I posted on Usenet:

$user = [ADSI]"LDAP://CN=Powershell Test,OU=Standard Users,OU=Site1,DC=testlab,DC=com"

$user.mailNickname = "ptest"

$user.msExchHomeServerName = "/o=testlab/ou=First Administrative Group/cn=Configuration/cn=Servers/cn=SITE1-03EX1"

$user.setinfo()

#wait for RUS - This can be seconds or hours depending on your Exchange configuration.

# To see the changes, reassign the modified AD object to $user

$user = [ADSI]"LDAP://CN=Powershell Test,OU=Standard Users,OU=Site1,DC=testlab,DC=com"

$user | fl *

The minimum attributes needed for RUS are mailNickname (Exchange Alias) and msExchHomeServerName. You can see the format that msExchHomeServerName expects in the example and this will obviously be different for every exchange server. If you don’t fill in any additional attributes, the mailbox will be created in the default mail store on the server specified. If you need to point to a different mail store, you can use the homeMDB attribute. Again, the easiest way to see the expected format is to grab an already mail-enabled user and take a look at the attributes:

PS C:\> $user = [ADSI]"LDAP://CN=Powershell Test,OU=Standard Users,OU=Site1,DC=testlab,DC=com"                          
PS C:\> $user | format-list cn,mailNickname,msExchHomeServerName,homeMDB,homeMTA,proxyAddresses                         
                                                                                                                        
                                                                                                                        
cn                   : {Powershell Test}                                                                                
mailNickname         : {ptest}                                                                                          
msExchHomeServerName : {/o=testlab/ou=First Administrative Group/cn=Configuration/cn=Servers/cn=SITE1-03EX1}            
homeMDB              : {CN=Mailbox Store (SITE1-03EX1),CN=First Storage Group,CN=InformationStore,CN=SITE1-03EX1,CN=Ser 
                       vers,CN=First Administrative Group,CN=Administrative Groups,CN=testlab,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN= 
                       Services,CN=Configuration,DC=testlab,DC=com}                                                     
homeMTA              : {CN=Microsoft MTA,CN=SITE1-03EX1,CN=Servers,CN=First Administrative Group,CN=Administrative Grou 
                       ps,CN=testlab,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=testlab,DC=com}              
proxyAddresses       : {SMTP:ptest@testlab.com, X400:c=US;a= ;p=testlab;o=Exchange;s=Test;g=Powershell;}

After you assign the necessary attributes and issue the .setInfo() method, you just have to wait for RUS to do it’s magic. This can take seconds or much longer. It just depends on how the Exchange environment is configured.

As with anything that directly modifies AD attributes… TEST, TEST and TEST some more in a LAB. Never start in a production environment.

gaurhoth

* Edited to reflect that this article is about Exchange 2003.

Table/Collection lookup with PowerShell

Per Østergaard — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:59:00 GMT

If you have to lookup data in a collection repeatedly, that can be quite slow.

Let us say you have two collections and want to update one collection based on some criteria from the other. You can do it like this -

$collA | % { $itemA=$_; $collB | ? { $_.key -eq $itemA.key} | % { $_.value=$itemA.value } }

But in this scenario, you have to iterate $collB for each of the value in $collA. This is not efficient, especially not when you have plus 50.000 elements in both collections.

As a way to speed things up, you can build a lookup table. Note that this only works, if the key is unique in $collB. The best choice for this is an hash table. You create it like this -

$collB | % {$hashB=@{}} {$key=$_.key; $hashB.$key=$_}

Now you can use the hash in your code -

$collA | % { $itemA=$_; $key=$itemA.key; $objB=$hashB.$key; $objB.value=$itemA.value }

The traversal of $collB is replaced by a much faster hash table lookup.

If you only need to know whether the value is in $collB, just do like this -

$collA | % { $itemA=$_; $key=$itemA.key; if ($hashB.$key) { "found" } }

I did a performance comparison (with only 500 items) so you can see the difference -

# Build two collections

1..500 | % { $collA=@(); $collB=@() } {
	$c=$_
	$collA+="" | select @{n="Key";e={$c}},@{n="Blah";e={$c+100000}}; 
	$collB+="" | select @{n="Key";e={$c}},@{n="Blah2";e={$c+200000}};
}


# Run 'normal' lookup

measure-command {
	$collA | % { $itemA=$_; $collB | ? { $_.key -eq $itemA.key} | % { $_.blah2=$itemA.blah+100000 } }
}
# It took 27,3 seconds

# Build hash and run hash lookup

measure-command {
	$collB | % { $hashB=@{} } { $key=$_.key; $hashB.$key=$_ }
	$collA | % { $itemA=$_; $key=$itemA.key; $objB=$hashB.$key; $objB.blah2=$itemA.blah+200000 }
}

# It took 0,1 seconds

Do I need to say more?

32-bit or 64-bit - What Is My Processor?

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 01:13:00 GMT

Almost everything you can buy in the server market these days is 64-bit capable - whether AMD or Intel. Almost. Much of what you buy in the desktop market is 64-bit capable - whether AMD or Intel. Much. Why do you care? Exchange Server 2007 is only supported in production on 64-bit servers running 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 (and soon Windows Server 2008). However, 32-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 can also be installed on 64-bit hardware. And that doesn't count! You need a 64

Windows PowerShell Tip of the Week: Using the Switch Statement

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 07:00:00 GMT

Believe it or not, the switch statement is known as one of the most useful statements in Windows PowerShell. Find out why this week.

AD Group Membership Management « Dmitry’s PowerBlog: PowerShell and beyond

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 06:46:36 GMT

Auditing Services Running as Service Accounts

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 17:19:36 GMT

So I recently had a need to locate any services on any system in a domain that was running under the context of a service account. Sure I could have used any number of auditing tools or any of a number of other methods…but where would be the sport in that? I wanted to use PowerShell to do it.

Now I could have been extremely simple with this script by just feeding it a text file and using Foreach-Object to run Get-WMIObject on each item and then pipe that through a Where-Object to filter and finally, dump it to Export-CSV to get my output…except that, like far too many companies today, this client had a fairly large number of defunct computer accounts and no accurate lists of system names which would have likely resulted in incomplete data and a lengthy runtime. Because of this, I needed to do a bit more pre-processing.

Enter the script I put together for this purpose (shown below). It requires the PowerShell Community Extensions (PSCX) to function properly as I use the Directory Services provider to get the computer names. Don't worry, it's completely free and you can get it here. The script gets the netbios domain name from the system on which it is running and uses the provider to find ALL computers in the domain. To deal with the dead and no access systems, I run each computer name through a ping check and record the results as to whether or not the check was successful or if the script couldn't even resolve the name (Note: The ping check is performed via the ping-host cmdlet which is also part of PSCX…two tools at once!! What can I say, I'm a giver). If the ping works, the script attempts to connect via WMI and retrieve a filtered list of services that have domain\username or computername\username as the account context under which they are running. All of the output is sent to Excel and formatted all pretty for you to do with as you will. Unfortunately, there was one minor lazy moment that made me leave something out…I don't have any error checking on the WMI connection. I should have, but I didn't…but anyone reading this is more than welcome to correct my oversight. In fact, all improvements are welcome and all I ask in return is that you shoot me a copy.

Anyway, I hope someone will find this useful…enjoy!

$erroractionpreference = "SilentlyContinue"

$strDom = $env:userdomain

$strDomain = $strDom + ":\"

$objExcel = New-Object -comobject Excel.Application

$objExcel.visible = $True

$objWB = $objExcel.Workbooks.Add()

$objWS = $objWB.Worksheets.Item(1)

$objWS.Cells.Item(1,1) = "System"

$objWS.Cells.Item(1,2) = "Ping Status"

$objWS.Cells.Item(1,3) = "Service Name"

$objWS.Cells.Item(1,4) = "Account"

$objWS.Cells.Item(1,5) = "Startup"

$objWS.Cells.Item(1,6) = "Status"

$objRange = $objWS.UsedRange

$objRange.Interior.ColorIndex = 19

$objRange.Font.ColorIndex = 11

$objRange.Font.Bold = $True

$Script:intRow = 2

# Query AD for objects of type 'computer' and store in variable

$arrComputers = Get-ChildItem $strDomain -recurse | Where-Object { $_.Type -like "computer" } | Select-Object Name

foreach ($objComputer in $arrComputers)

{

Function GetSvcInfo

{

Param([string] $strComputer)

# Set variables for use as WMI query string

$strQuery = ('Select * from Win32_Service where StartName LIKE "%' + $strDom + '%" OR StartName LIKE "%' + $strComputer + '%"')

# Connect to computer with WMI and get filtered service info

$objWMI = Get-WmiObject -q $strQuery -computer $strComputer

# Check to see if $objWMI has any data and record results as appropriate

If($objWMI -eq $NULL)

{

$objWS.Cells.Item($intRow,3) = "N/A"

$Script:intRow = $intRow + 1

}

Else

{

foreach($objSvc in $objWMI)

{

$objWS.Cells.Item($intRow,3) = $objSVC.Name

$objWS.Cells.Item($intRow,4) = $objSVC.StartName

$objWS.Cells.Item($intRow,5) = $objSVC.StartMode

$objWS.Cells.Item($intRow,6) = $objSVC.State

$Script:intRow = $intRow + 1

}

$results = ping-host $objComputer.Name -count 1 -q

If($results.Received -eq "1")

{

$strComputer = $objComputer.Name

$objWS.Cells.Item($intRow,1) = $objComputer.Name

$objWS.Cells.Item($intRow,2) = "Online"

GetSvcInfo $strComputer

}

ElseIf($results.Received -eq "0")

{

$objWS.Cells.Item($intRow,1) = $objComputer.Name

$objWS.Cells.Item($intRow,2) = "Offline"

$intRow = $intRow + 1

}

Else

{

$objWS.Cells.Item($intRow,1) = $objComputer.Name

$objWS.Cells.Item($intRow,2) = "Cannot Resolve"

$intRow = $intRow + 1

}

$objRange.EntireColumn.AutoFit()

Windows PowerShell Tip of the Week: Running Windows PowerShell Scripts Against Multiple Computers

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 06:00:00 GMT

Learn several different ways to read computer names into a script and run the script against those computers.

Essential PowerShell: Learn how to find what you are looking for

Kirk Munro — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:23:07 GMT

As silly as this may sound, learning how to find what you’re looking for in PowerShell is key if you want to learn PowerShell quickly and easily. PowerShell is a rather unique language in that most of the information you will need to use the language is retrievable by using the language itself. The problem for newcomers to PowerShell who like to dive right in when learning something and who don’t want to read through lots of documentation to get started is that they need to know some PowerShell to learn more about PowerShell and what it can do.

When I first started learning PowerShell I was fortunate to be able to see PowerShell presented twice, both times by Jeffrey Snover, the “father” of PowerShell. In both presentations as he wrapped things up he mentioned that if there’s one thing you should make sure that you take with you about PowerShell it’s a set of five cmdlets that are key to learning more about PowerShell. They are (in no particular order): Get-Help, Get-Command, Get-Member, Get-PSDrive and Get-Alias.

Rather than pulling the documentation about these cmdlets into this article, I thought it would be more useful to follow the KISS principle and list a series of questions you might ask yourself about PowerShell accompanied with the PowerShell script (mostly one-liners) that can be used to answer those very questions primarily using the cmdlets I mentioned above. Here are the questions and their answers to help get you started.

I’ve heard PowerShell cmdlets all follow a verb-noun syntax. What verbs are available in PowerShell?

Get-Command -CommandType Cmdlet | Group-Object -Property Verb -NoElement

What cmdlets use the verb “out”?

Get-Command -Verb Out

What cmdlets use the noun “command”?

Get-Command -Noun Command

What examples are available for the Tee-Object cmdlet?

Get-Help Tee-Object -examples

What is the full help information for Tee-Object?

Get-Help Tee-Object -Full | Out-Host -Paging
# Note: I could have replaced “Out-Host -Paging” with “more” and the result would have been the same

What are the non-common parameters of Set-Location (with their documentation)?

Get-Help Set-Location -Parameter *

What cmdlets have a parameter like “path”?

Get-Help * -Parameter *path* | Sort-Object -Property Name

What general PowerShell help topics are available?

Get-Help -Category HelpFile,Provider

I need general help on operators. Where can I find that information?

Get-Help -Category HelpFile,Provider | Where-Object { (Get-Help $_.Name | Out-String).Contains(“operator”) }

Now that I see the help topics and providers that reference the keyword “operator”, how do I see the details?

Get-Help about_operator
Get-Help Variable
# etc.

What aliases are defined for the ForEach-Object cmdlet?

Get-Alias | Where-Object {$_.Definition -eq “ForEach-Object”}

I’ve heard PowerShell even treats the registry as a drive. What other drives are there?

Get-PSDrive

How do I start browsing the Registry in PowerShell?

Set-Location HKLM: # or cd HKLM:
Get-ChildItem # or dir
Set-Location Software # or cd Software
# etc.

I noticed that there is a drive for environment variables. How do I use that to check the value of my Path environment variable?

(Get-Item env:Path).Value

How do I add all of my installed PowerShell snapins to the current session so that I can use their cmdlets too?

Get-PSSnapin -Registered | ForEach-Object { if ((Get-PSSnapin $_.Name -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) -eq $null) { Add-PSSnapin $_.Name } }

(Note: More useful one-liners using Get-PSSnapin can be found here.)

I need to enumerate a bunch of services and then do other things. Since these are enumerated as objects, how can I tell what I can do with them (i.e. how can I tell what properties and methods they have)?

Get-Service | Get-Member

Are there other basic questions that you think should be on this list? After learning how to find the information you need within PowerShell, what has been your biggest stumbling block? Let me know in the comments!

Kirk out.

Scripting Active Directory

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 21:41:30 GMT

Scripting Active Directory I seem to have been dong a lot of scripting work recently - I really should be using PowerShell, but I had limited time to get this stuff done and it needed to pretty generic / simple as it would be implemented by others (some with limited knowledge of scripting

/\/\o\/\/ PowerShelled: PowerShell : Learn about the HashTable Object and other Collections

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 06:27:33 GMT

RegExLib.com Regular Expression Cheat Sheet (.NET Framework)

jjh — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 06:09:24 GMT

bookmark this on del.icio.us - posted by jjh to cheatsheet development programming regularexpressions regexp - more about this bookmark...

Microsoft Command Line Standard

Thu, 17 May 2007 01:20:53 GMT

Microsoft Command Line Standard

Thu, 17 May 2007 01:20:53 GMT

Windows Administration: Simplify Group Policy Administration with Windows PowerShell -- TechNet Magazine, May 2007

ironfroggy — Mon, 07 May 2007 03:26:30 GMT

bookmark this on del.icio.us - posted by ironfroggy to toread powershell - more about this bookmark...

Windows Administration: Simplify Group Policy Administration with Windows PowerShell -- TechNet Magazine, May 2007

ironfroggy — Mon, 07 May 2007 03:26:30 GMT

bookmark this on del.icio.us - posted by ironfroggy to toread powershell - more about this bookmark...

Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line

Sun, 06 May 2007 23:59:39 GMT

Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line

Sun, 06 May 2007 23:59:39 GMT

Command-line reference A-Z

Sun, 06 May 2007 23:59:01 GMT

Command-line reference A-Z

Sun, 06 May 2007 23:59:01 GMT

John Howard : WMIC Samples

Sun, 06 May 2007 23:58:15 GMT

John Howard : WMIC Samples

Sun, 06 May 2007 23:58:15 GMT

Creating an AD Shell

benp — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 15:28:00 GMT

Hello Again

This is my third post in the Active Directory and PowerShell series. In this post I want to talk about how to create your own pseudo-cmdlets to manage the AD. I`m going to talk about how to present scripts to PowerShell that behave in a similar way to Cmdlets, that then allow easy administration of the AD. You may well think I`m mad, but how cool would it be to do this in a shell:

PS C:\> get-dn benp

'LDAP://CN=benp,OU=Admins,DC=umpadom,DC=com'

PS C:\> enable-user benp

User: benp enabled

PS C:\> disable-user benp

User: benp disabled

PS C:\> Set-ADProp benp GivenName Ben

GivenName property set for user benp

PS C:\> Get-ADProp benp GivenName

Ben

Wait a minute! There is no native support for Active Directory that does this. What magic is this!

Well in this post I`m going to show you how to create these example pseudo-cmdlets, and show you that whilst they are mighty cool, there is nothing that difficult or clever about them.

Creating the Pseudo-Cmdlets

First thing I want to be clear about is that these commands are not real Cmdlets. They have not been added via a snapin, and do not behave in the same way as Cmdlets. The command “get-dn” is simply a function that calls a script, and passes in some arguments. The script then does some stuff and returns some text. It does not return an object! Cmdlets normally return objects – these don’t. However, we can use them to create a shell like interface to do common tasks.

The Script

Let’s take Enable-User as an example. Probably best you read my previous 2 posts before you look at this, might make it a bit easier to understand:

# Function to enable user

# Takes SAM Name

$Error.clear()

$ErrorActionPreference = "silentlycontinue"

function get-dn ($SAMName)

{

$root = [ADSI]''

$searcher = new-object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher($root)

$searcher.filter = ("(sAMAccountName= $SAMName)")

$user = $searcher.findall()

if ($user.count -gt 1)

{

$count = 0

foreach($i in $user)

{

write-host $count ": " $i.path

$count = $count + 1

}

$selection = Read-Host "Please select item: "

return $user[$selection].path

}

else

{

return $user[0].path

}

$userdn = get-dn $Args[0]

$user = [ADSI] $userdn

$user.psbase.invokeset("AccountDisabled", "False")

$user.setinfo()

if ($error.count -ne 0)

{

"Error enabling user: " + $Args[0]

$error[0].exception

}

else

{

"User: " + $Args[0] + " enabled"

}

Most of this code is the same as get-dn, which I explained in my previous post. There only difference is what we do to the AD, and a bit of basic error checking. Let’s go through what happens in the code once we have the path to the user object we want to manipulate:

$userdn = get-dn $Args[0]

$user = [ADSI] $userdn

$user.psbase.invokeset("AccountDisabled", "False")

$user.setinfo()

All we do is create an object with the user object path as a constructor. Once we have this we simply set the user property AccountDisabled to be False. Then we commit the change to the AD. Simple! I use the invokeset method here, because it’s really easy to use. If you use the ADSI provider its actually a bit harder than the .Net Framework method.

The error handling here is very basic. I might write a post on error handling soon. The basic algorithm for error handling is:

Clear the $error.count

Do Stuff

If the $error.count is greater than 0 (we had an error)

Output anerror message

Else

Output operation successful text

Turning the script to a Pseudo-Cmdlet

To make the script accessible from just typing “enable-user”, all we need to do is create a function that utilises that script. To create a function we use the new-item Cmdlet. Here’s the code I use:

new-item -path function:enable-user -value {& 'C:\scripts\enable-user.ps1' $args[0]}

There we go. An easy way to enable user accounts.

That function will be loaded in PowerShell until the instance of PowerShell closes. So how can we make the function persistent? Well there are 2 ways. The simple way is to add this line to your profile. The profile file can be found by typing $profile in the shell. That means that every time you load PowerShell the function will be loaded.

However, I don’t really want that. I want to be able to load a script with all these functions when I want to administer the AD. Therefore I collected all my function definitions into 1 file: ADSupport.ps1. This file contains this:

new-item -path function:get-dn -value {& 'C:\scripts\getuserdn.ps1' $args[0]}

new-item -path function:get-adprop -value {& 'C:\scripts\get-adprop.ps1' $args[0] $args[1]}

new-item -path function:set-adprop -value {& 'C:\scripts\set-adprop.ps1' $args[0] $args[1] $args[2]}

new-item -path function:disable-user -value {& 'C:\scripts\disable-user.ps1' $args[0]}

new-item -path function:enable-user -value {& 'C:\scripts\enable-user.ps1' $args[0]}

Problem: if I run .\adsupport.ps1 it does not import these functions. If you try it you’ll find that none the functions are available. This is because by default the script is executed in a different scope. We want it executed in the PowerShell scope and therefore we must use an extra full stop (period if you live across the atlantic).

. .\adsupport.ps1

Now all your functions will be available to use.

Other Scripts

Here is the code to get all the above functions working.

Get-DN

See previous post

Disable User

# Function to disable user

# Takes SAM Name

$error.psbase.clear()

$erroractionpreference = "silentlycontinue"

function get-dn ($SAMName)

{

$root = [ADSI]''

$searcher = new-object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher($root)

$searcher.filter = ("(sAMAccountName= $SAMName)")

$user = $searcher.findall()

if ($user.count -gt 1)

{

$count = 0

foreach($i in $user)

{

write-host $count ": " $i.path

$count = $count + 1

}

$selection = Read-Host "Please select item: "

return $user[$selection].path

}

else

{

return $user[0].path

}

$userdn = get-dn $Args[0]

$user = [ADSI] $userdn

$user.psbase.invokeset("AccountDisabled", "True")

$user.setinfo()

if ($error.count -ne 0)

{

"Error disabling user: " + $Args[0]

$error[0].exception

}

else

{

"User: " + $Args[0] + " disabled"

}

Get-ADProp

# Function to query AD Object Properties

# Takes SAM, Property

$Error.psbase.clear()

$ErrorActionPreference = "SilentlyContinue"

#Use the below line in the profile to assign to get-adprop

#new-item -path function:get-adprop -value {& 'C:\store\ps scripts\get-adprop.ps1' $args[0] $args[1]}

function get-dn ($SAMName)

{

$root = [ADSI]''

$searcher = new-object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher($root)

$searcher.filter = ("(sAMAccountName= $SAMName)")

$user = $searcher.findall()

if ($user.count -gt 1)

{

$count = 0

foreach($i in $user)

{

write-host $count ": " $i.path

$count = $count + 1

}

$selection = Read-Host "Please select item: "

return $user[$selection].path

}

else

{

return $user[0].path

}

$username = get-dn $Args[0]

$user = [ADSI] $username

$user.Get($Args[1])

if ($error.count -ne 0)

{

"Error getting property " + $Args[1] + " for " + $Args[0]

$error[0].exception

}

Set-ADProp

# Function to set AD Object Properties

# Takes SAM, Property, Value

#Use the below line in the profile to assign to get-adprop

#new-item -path function:set-adprop -value {& 'C:\store\ps scripts\set-adprop.ps1' $args[0] $args[1] $args[2]}

function get-dn ($SAMName)

{

$root = [ADSI]''

$searcher = new-object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher($root)

$searcher.filter = ("(sAMAccountName= $SAMName)")

$user = $searcher.findall()

if ($user.count -gt 1)

{

$count = 0

foreach($i in $user)

{

write-host $count ": " $i.path

$count = $count + 1

}

$selection = Read-Host "Please select item: "

return $user[$selection].path

}

else

{

return $user[0].path

}

$username = get-dn $Args[0]

$user = [ADSI] $username

$user.put($Args[1], $Args[2])

$user.setinfo()

if ($error.count -ne 0)

{

"Error setting " + $Args[1]

$error[0].exception

}

else

{

$Args[1] + " property set for user" + $Args[0]

}

Well ladies and gents. Hope you enjoyed this. Coding errors on a post card please J

That is all

BenP

Creating an AD Shell

benp — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 15:28:00 GMT

Hello Again

PS C:\> get-dn benp

'LDAP://CN=benp,OU=Admins,DC=umpadom,DC=com'

PS C:\> enable-user benp

User: benp enabled

PS C:\> disable-user benp

User: benp disabled

PS C:\> Set-ADProp benp GivenName Ben

GivenName property set for user benp

PS C:\> Get-ADProp benp GivenName

Ben

Wait a minute! There is no native support for Active Directory that does this. What magic is this!

Well in this post I`m going to show you how to create these example pseudo-cmdlets, and show you that whilst they are mighty cool, there is nothing that difficult or clever about them.

Creating the Pseudo-Cmdlets

The Script

Let’s take Enable-User as an example. Probably best you read my previous 2 posts before you look at this, might make it a bit easier to understand:

# Function to enable user

# Takes SAM Name

$Error.clear()

$ErrorActionPreference = "silentlycontinue"

function get-dn ($SAMName)

{

$root = [ADSI]''

$searcher = new-object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher($root)

$searcher.filter = ("(sAMAccountName= $SAMName)")

$user = $searcher.findall()

if ($user.count -gt 1)

{

$count = 0

foreach($i in $user)

{

write-host $count ": " $i.path

$count = $count + 1

}

$selection = Read-Host "Please select item: "

return $user[$selection].path

}

else

{

return $user[0].path

}

$userdn = get-dn $Args[0]

$user = [ADSI] $userdn

$user.psbase.invokeset("AccountDisabled", "False")

$user.setinfo()

if ($error.count -ne 0)

{

"Error enabling user: " + $Args[0]

$error[0].exception

}

else

{

"User: " + $Args[0] + " enabled"

}

$userdn = get-dn $Args[0]

$user = [ADSI] $userdn

$user.psbase.invokeset("AccountDisabled", "False")

$user.setinfo()

The error handling here is very basic. I might write a post on error handling soon. The basic algorithm for error handling is:

Clear the $error.count

Do Stuff

If the $error.count is greater than 0 (we had an error)

Output anerror message

Else

Output operation successful text

Turning the script to a Pseudo-Cmdlet

new-item -path function:enable-user -value {& 'C:\scripts\enable-user.ps1' $args[0]}

There we go. An easy way to enable user accounts.

new-item -path function:get-dn -value {& 'C:\scripts\getuserdn.ps1' $args[0]}

new-item -path function:get-adprop -value {& 'C:\scripts\get-adprop.ps1' $args[0] $args[1]}

new-item -path function:set-adprop -value {& 'C:\scripts\set-adprop.ps1' $args[0] $args[1] $args[2]}

new-item -path function:disable-user -value {& 'C:\scripts\disable-user.ps1' $args[0]}

new-item -path function:enable-user -value {& 'C:\scripts\enable-user.ps1' $args[0]}

. .\adsupport.ps1

Now all your functions will be available to use.

Other Scripts

Here is the code to get all the above functions working.

Get-DN

See previous post

Disable User

# Function to disable user

# Takes SAM Name

$error.psbase.clear()

$erroractionpreference = "silentlycontinue"

function get-dn ($SAMName)

{

$root = [ADSI]''

$searcher = new-object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher($root)

$searcher.filter = ("(sAMAccountName= $SAMName)")

$user = $searcher.findall()

if ($user.count -gt 1)

{

$count = 0

foreach($i in $user)

{

write-host $count ": " $i.path

$count = $count + 1

}

$selection = Read-Host "Please select item: "

return $user[$selection].path

}

else

{

return $user[0].path

}

$userdn = get-dn $Args[0]

$user = [ADSI] $userdn

$user.psbase.invokeset("AccountDisabled", "True")

$user.setinfo()

if ($error.count -ne 0)

{

"Error disabling user: " + $Args[0]

$error[0].exception

}

else

{

"User: " + $Args[0] + " disabled"

}

Get-ADProp

# Function to query AD Object Properties

# Takes SAM, Property

$Error.psbase.clear()

$ErrorActionPreference = "SilentlyContinue"

#Use the below line in the profile to assign to get-adprop

#new-item -path function:get-adprop -value {& 'C:\store\ps scripts\get-adprop.ps1' $args[0] $args[1]}

function get-dn ($SAMName)

{

$root = [ADSI]''

$searcher = new-object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher($root)

$searcher.filter = ("(sAMAccountName= $SAMName)")

$user = $searcher.findall()

if ($user.count -gt 1)

{

$count = 0

foreach($i in $user)

{

write-host $count ": " $i.path

$count = $count + 1

}

$selection = Read-Host "Please select item: "

return $user[$selection].path

}

else

{

return $user[0].path

}

$username = get-dn $Args[0]

$user = [ADSI] $username

$user.Get($Args[1])

if ($error.count -ne 0)

{

"Error getting property " + $Args[1] + " for " + $Args[0]

$error[0].exception

}

Set-ADProp

# Function to set AD Object Properties

# Takes SAM, Property, Value

#Use the below line in the profile to assign to get-adprop

#new-item -path function:set-adprop -value {& 'C:\store\ps scripts\set-adprop.ps1' $args[0] $args[1] $args[2]}

function get-dn ($SAMName)

{

$root = [ADSI]''

$searcher = new-object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher($root)

$searcher.filter = ("(sAMAccountName= $SAMName)")

$user = $searcher.findall()

if ($user.count -gt 1)

{

$count = 0

foreach($i in $user)

{

write-host $count ": " $i.path

$count = $count + 1

}

$selection = Read-Host "Please select item: "

return $user[$selection].path

}

else

{

return $user[0].path

}

$username = get-dn $Args[0]

$user = [ADSI] $username

$user.put($Args[1], $Args[2])

$user.setinfo()

if ($error.count -ne 0)

{

"Error setting " + $Args[1]

$error[0].exception

}

else

{

$Args[1] + " property set for user" + $Args[0]

}

Well ladies and gents. Hope you enjoyed this. Coding errors on a post card please J

That is all

BenP

Updated Event Log Check

Jeffery Hicks — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 11:00:00 GMT

A few months ago, I wrote an entry about using Powershell to look at recent event logs. Since then, I’ve decided to make a minor improvement. The new function lets you specify the number of event logs to retrieve.

Updated Event Log Check

Jeffery Hicks — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 11:00:00 GMT

get-datatable.ps1

mwilbur — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 20:40:57 GMT

get-datatable.ps1 is an improvement on the get-dataset.ps1 from an earlier post. Instead of returning a dataset it returns a DataTable; and a UpdateSql method is added to the object returned, so you don't need a separate script to send the changes back to sql.

This allows updates to a small table to look like:

$t = datatable "select * from stuff" -db foo
$t | %{ .... update the data rows ... }
$t.UpdateSql()

Get-DataTable.ps1:

param ($sql,$server=".",$db) 

$connectionstring= "Server=$server;database=$db;trusted_connection=yes;" 
$dt = new-object data.DataTable 
$da = New-Object system.data.sqlclient.sqldataadapter $sql, $connectionstring 
$null = $da.Fill($dt) 
$dt.ExtendedProperties["sql"]= $sql 
$dt.ExtendedProperties["connectionstring"]= $connectionstring 

$dt = add-member ScriptMethod UpdateSql { 
$da = New-Object system.data.sqlclient.sqldataadapter $this.ExtendedProperties["sql"], $this.ExtendedProperties["connectionstring"] 

$cb = new-object system.data.sqlclient.sqlcommandbuilder $da 
$da.UpdateCommand = $cb.GetUpdateCommand() 
$da.InsertCommand = $cb.GetInsertCommand() 
$da.DeleteCommand = $cb.GetDeleteCommand() 
$null = $da.Update($this) 
} -in $dt -pass 

#return data table in array so table doesn't get decomposed into an array of data rows. 
,$dt

get-datatable.ps1

mwilbur — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 20:40:57 GMT

This allows updates to a small table to look like:

$t = datatable "select * from stuff" -db foo
$t | %{ .... update the data rows ... }
$t.UpdateSql()

Get-DataTable.ps1:

param ($sql,$server=".",$db) 

$connectionstring= "Server=$server;database=$db;trusted_connection=yes;" 
$dt = new-object data.DataTable 
$da = New-Object system.data.sqlclient.sqldataadapter $sql, $connectionstring 
$null = $da.Fill($dt) 
$dt.ExtendedProperties["sql"]= $sql 
$dt.ExtendedProperties["connectionstring"]= $connectionstring 

$dt = add-member ScriptMethod UpdateSql { 
$da = New-Object system.data.sqlclient.sqldataadapter $this.ExtendedProperties["sql"], $this.ExtendedProperties["connectionstring"] 

$cb = new-object system.data.sqlclient.sqlcommandbuilder $da 
$da.UpdateCommand = $cb.GetUpdateCommand() 
$da.InsertCommand = $cb.GetInsertCommand() 
$da.DeleteCommand = $cb.GetDeleteCommand() 
$null = $da.Update($this) 
} -in $dt -pass 

#return data table in array so table doesn't get decomposed into an array of data rows. 
,$dt

My Powershell Profile Script

Peter Provost — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 19:25:00 GMT

The other day a friend asked me for my Powershell profile script. It reminded me of when we used to pass csh/ksh/bash scripts around... but now I'm showing my age.

So, here is mine. Unlike Brad Wilson, I decided to put most of my stuff in this file and not to separate out things into separate .ps1 files. To each his own. There is basically no difference.

(Download link is at the bottom)

########################################################
# Peter's PowerShell Profile (peter@provost.org)
#  v2.0 (2007-01-13)
########################################################

########################################################
# Aliases
set-alias grep select-string;
set-alias wide format-wide;
########################################################

########################################################
# Environment variables
set-content env:\VISUAL '"C:\Program Files\Vim\Vim70\gvim.exe"';
########################################################

########################################################
# Helper Functions
function ff ([string] $glob) { get-childitem -recurse -include $glob }
function osr { shutdown -r -t 5 }
function osh { shutdown -h -t 5 }
function rmd ([string] $glob) { remove-item -recurse -force $glob }
function whoami { (get-content env:\userdomain) + "\" + (get-content env:\username); }
function strip-extension ([string] $filename) { 
	[system.io.path]::getfilenamewithoutextension($filename)
} 
########################################################

########################################################
# Prompt
function prompt {
	$nextId = (get-history -count 1).Id + 1;
	$promptText = "[" + $nextId + "] ?";

	$wi = [System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent()
		$wp = new-object 'System.Security.Principal.WindowsPrincipal' $wi

		if ( $wp.IsInRole("Administrators") -eq 1 )
		{
			$color = "Red"
				$title = "**ADMIN** - " + (get-location).Path;
		}
		else
		{
			$color = "Green"
				$title = (get-location).Path;
		}

	write-host $promptText -NoNewLine -ForegroundColor $color
		$host.UI.RawUI.WindowTitle = $title;

	return " "
}
########################################################

########################################################
# Custom 'cd' command to maintain directory history
if( test-path alias:\cd ) { remove-item alias:\cd }
$GLOBAL:PWD = get-location;
$GLOBAL:CDHIST = [System.Collections.Arraylist]::Repeat($PWD, 1);
function cd {
	$cwd = get-location;
	$l = $GLOBAL:CDHIST.count;

	if ($args.length -eq 0) { 
		set-location $HOME;
		$GLOBAL:PWD = get-location;
		$GLOBAL:CDHIST.Remove($GLOBAL:PWD);
		if ($GLOBAL:CDHIST[0] -ne $GLOBAL:PWD) {
			$GLOBAL:CDHIST.Insert(0,$GLOBAL:PWD);
		}
		$GLOBAL:PWD;
	}
	elseif ($args[0] -like "-[0-9]*") {
		$num = $args[0].Replace("-","");
		$GLOBAL:PWD = $GLOBAL:CDHIST[$num];
		set-location $GLOBAL:PWD;
		$GLOBAL:CDHIST.RemoveAt($num);
		$GLOBAL:CDHIST.Insert(0,$GLOBAL:PWD);
		$GLOBAL:PWD;
	}
	elseif ($args[0] -eq "-l") {
		for ($i = $l-1; $i -ge 0 ; $i--) { 
			"{0,6}  {1}" -f $i, $GLOBAL:CDHIST[$i];
		}
	}
	elseif ($args[0] -eq "-") { 
		if ($GLOBAL:CDHIST.count -gt 1) {
			$t = $CDHIST[0];
			$CDHIST[0] = $CDHIST[1];
			$CDHIST[1] = $t;
			set-location $GLOBAL:CDHIST[0];
			$GLOBAL:PWD = get-location;
		}
		$GLOBAL:PWD;
	}
	else { 
		set-location "$args";
		$GLOBAL:PWD = pwd; 
		for ($i = ($l - 1); $i -ge 0; $i--) { 
			if ($GLOBAL:PWD -eq $CDHIST[$i]) {
				$GLOBAL:CDHIST.RemoveAt($i);
			}
		}

		$GLOBAL:CDHIST.Insert(0,$GLOBAL:PWD);
		$GLOBAL:PWD;
	}

	$GLOBAL:PWD = get-location;
}
########################################################

########################################################
# Custom PS-only path settings
#   use this for directories that contain PS1 
#   files since they generally can't be run 
#   outside of PowerShell
#
function script:append-path {
	$oldPath = get-content Env:\Path;
	$newPath = $oldPath + ";" + $args;
	set-content Env:\Path $newPath;
}

append-path (resolve-path '~/PowerShell Scripts').Path
########################################################


########################################################
# Custom format filters
filter Format-Bytes {
	$units = 'B  ', 'KiB', 'MiB', 'GiB', 'TiB';
	$ln = [Int64]0 + $_;
	$u = 0;

	if($ln -eq 0) {
		return '0    ';
	}

	while(($ln -gt 1024) -and ($u -lt $units.Length)) {
		$ln /= 1024;
		$u++;
	}

	'{0,7:0.###} {1}' -f $ln, $units[$u];
}
########################################################

########################################################
# 'go' command and targets
if( $GLOBAL:go_locations -eq $null ) {
	$GLOBAL:go_locations = @{};
}

function go ([string] $location) {
	if( $go_locations.ContainsKey($location) ) {
		set-location $go_locations[$location];
	} else {
		write-output "The following locations are defined:";
		write-output $go_locations;
	}
}

$go_locations.Add("home", "~")
$go_locations.Add("dl", "~\Desktop\Downloads")
$go_locations.Add("dev", "C:\Development")
$go_locations.Add("scripts", "~\PowerShell Scripts")
$go_locations.Add("addons", "C:\World of Warcraft\Interface\Addons")
########################################################

Download Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1.txt here. You will need to rename the file and put it where $profile is set.

My Powershell Profile Script

Peter Provost — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 19:25:00 GMT

The other day a friend asked me for my Powershell profile script. It reminded me of when we used to pass csh/ksh/bash scripts around... but now I'm showing my age.

So, here is mine. Unlike Brad Wilson, I decided to put most of my stuff in this file and not to separate out things into separate .ps1 files. To each his own. There is basically no difference.

(Download link is at the bottom)

########################################################
# Peter's PowerShell Profile (peter@provost.org)
#  v2.0 (2007-01-13)
########################################################

########################################################
# Aliases
set-alias grep select-string;
set-alias wide format-wide;
########################################################

########################################################
# Environment variables
set-content env:\VISUAL '"C:\Program Files\Vim\Vim70\gvim.exe"';
########################################################

########################################################
# Helper Functions
function ff ([string] $glob) { get-childitem -recurse -include $glob }
function osr { shutdown -r -t 5 }
function osh { shutdown -h -t 5 }
function rmd ([string] $glob) { remove-item -recurse -force $glob }
function whoami { (get-content env:\userdomain) + "\" + (get-content env:\username); }
function strip-extension ([string] $filename) { 
	[system.io.path]::getfilenamewithoutextension($filename)
} 
########################################################

########################################################
# Prompt
function prompt {
	$nextId = (get-history -count 1).Id + 1;
	$promptText = "[" + $nextId + "] ?";

	$wi = [System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent()
		$wp = new-object 'System.Security.Principal.WindowsPrincipal' $wi

		if ( $wp.IsInRole("Administrators") -eq 1 )
		{
			$color = "Red"
				$title = "**ADMIN** - " + (get-location).Path;
		}
		else
		{
			$color = "Green"
				$title = (get-location).Path;
		}

	write-host $promptText -NoNewLine -ForegroundColor $color
		$host.UI.RawUI.WindowTitle = $title;

	return " "
}
########################################################

########################################################
# Custom 'cd' command to maintain directory history
if( test-path alias:\cd ) { remove-item alias:\cd }
$GLOBAL:PWD = get-location;
$GLOBAL:CDHIST = [System.Collections.Arraylist]::Repeat($PWD, 1);
function cd {
	$cwd = get-location;
	$l = $GLOBAL:CDHIST.count;

	if ($args.length -eq 0) { 
		set-location $HOME;
		$GLOBAL:PWD = get-location;
		$GLOBAL:CDHIST.Remove($GLOBAL:PWD);
		if ($GLOBAL:CDHIST[0] -ne $GLOBAL:PWD) {
			$GLOBAL:CDHIST.Insert(0,$GLOBAL:PWD);
		}
		$GLOBAL:PWD;
	}
	elseif ($args[0] -like "-[0-9]*") {
		$num = $args[0].Replace("-","");
		$GLOBAL:PWD = $GLOBAL:CDHIST[$num];
		set-location $GLOBAL:PWD;
		$GLOBAL:CDHIST.RemoveAt($num);
		$GLOBAL:CDHIST.Insert(0,$GLOBAL:PWD);
		$GLOBAL:PWD;
	}
	elseif ($args[0] -eq "-l") {
		for ($i = $l-1; $i -ge 0 ; $i--) { 
			"{0,6}  {1}" -f $i, $GLOBAL:CDHIST[$i];
		}
	}
	elseif ($args[0] -eq "-") { 
		if ($GLOBAL:CDHIST.count -gt 1) {
			$t = $CDHIST[0];
			$CDHIST[0] = $CDHIST[1];
			$CDHIST[1] = $t;
			set-location $GLOBAL:CDHIST[0];
			$GLOBAL:PWD = get-location;
		}
		$GLOBAL:PWD;
	}
	else { 
		set-location "$args";
		$GLOBAL:PWD = pwd; 
		for ($i = ($l - 1); $i -ge 0; $i--) { 
			if ($GLOBAL:PWD -eq $CDHIST[$i]) {
				$GLOBAL:CDHIST.RemoveAt($i);
			}
		}

		$GLOBAL:CDHIST.Insert(0,$GLOBAL:PWD);
		$GLOBAL:PWD;
	}

	$GLOBAL:PWD = get-location;
}
########################################################

########################################################
# Custom PS-only path settings
#   use this for directories that contain PS1 
#   files since they generally can't be run 
#   outside of PowerShell
#
function script:append-path {
	$oldPath = get-content Env:\Path;
	$newPath = $oldPath + ";" + $args;
	set-content Env:\Path $newPath;
}

append-path (resolve-path '~/PowerShell Scripts').Path
########################################################


########################################################
# Custom format filters
filter Format-Bytes {
	$units = 'B  ', 'KiB', 'MiB', 'GiB', 'TiB';
	$ln = [Int64]0 + $_;
	$u = 0;

	if($ln -eq 0) {
		return '0    ';
	}

	while(($ln -gt 1024) -and ($u -lt $units.Length)) {
		$ln /= 1024;
		$u++;
	}

	'{0,7:0.###} {1}' -f $ln, $units[$u];
}
########################################################

########################################################
# 'go' command and targets
if( $GLOBAL:go_locations -eq $null ) {
	$GLOBAL:go_locations = @{};
}

function go ([string] $location) {
	if( $go_locations.ContainsKey($location) ) {
		set-location $go_locations[$location];
	} else {
		write-output "The following locations are defined:";
		write-output $go_locations;
	}
}

$go_locations.Add("home", "~")
$go_locations.Add("dl", "~\Desktop\Downloads")
$go_locations.Add("dev", "C:\Development")
$go_locations.Add("scripts", "~\PowerShell Scripts")
$go_locations.Add("addons", "C:\World of Warcraft\Interface\Addons")
########################################################

Download Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1.txt here. You will need to rename the file and put it where $profile is set.