When working in PowerShell, and especially when scripting, you might want to give the user a choice of actions. For example, you might develop a configuration script that another admin or technician will run. Perhaps one of the steps is to configure networking depending on their location so you want to give the person running the script a menu of choices. Here’s one way you might accomplish this, without resorting to graphical tools or WinForms. Continue reading
Now for something completely different but hopefully a little fun. I’m a big fan of word games and puzzles. Tim Bolton has assembled a few PowerShell themed crosswords, which you can find on his blog. I’ve always like word finds so I put together a pretty simple one using 16 common PowerShell cmdlet names.
You can find cmdlet names forwards, backwards and diagonally. I used full cmdlet names like Where-Object, but omitted the dash, so you would be looking for WhereObject. By the way, that is not one of the names in the puzzle. If people like this I might create some more using a larger grid and perhaps extending the content to include aliases, concepts or anything else that seems fun.
To play, I guess you could print this page. Or you can download this PDF document. The puzzle is on Page 1 and the solution is on Page 2. Enjoy!
Today I came across a post about pinging a list of computers and send the results as a table via Outlook. Brian is a very smart Active Directory guy so I offered some PowerShell suggestions to make his task even easier. Obviously you can only offer so much in a blog comment, so I thought I’d drop a few more details here. Continue reading
Earlier this week on Google Plus, Hal Rottenberg posted a PowerShell idea he had. His goal was to identify a group of objects that would be statistically significant. For example, given a collection of files, group the files by size but ranked by size so that you might have a group for the largest files, then big files, then average files and finally small files. His idea was to calculate a rank using a logarithm of the file size. His code was quick and dirty so I took it, as I usually do, and ran with it. The result is a function that will analyse any group of objects and rank them based on a numeric property. Continue reading
A few weeks ago I posted about updating multi-valued attributes in Active Directory. Part 1 covered how to accomplish this in PowerShell using ADSI. In Part 2 I’ll show you how to accomplish this using the free Active Directory cmdlets from Quest Software. As you’ll see, the over all process isn’t that much different. Except that using cmdlets simplifies a lot of the typing. Continue reading
I am certified Microsoft professional, a Microsoft MVP and an IT veteran with almost 20 years of experience, much of it spent as an IT consultant specializing in Windows server technologies. I work today as an independent author, trainer and consultant. I've co-authored or authored several books, courseware, and training videos on administrative scripting and automation. My latest book is Managing Active Directory with Windows PowerShel: TFM 2nd Ed.(SAPIEN Press 2011).
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