In PowerShell v2, to list only files or only folders you had to do filtering yourself: Get-ChildItem $env:windir | Where-Object { $_.PSIsContainer -eq $true } Get-ChildItem $env:windir | Where-Object { $_.PSIsContainer -eq $false } In PowerShell v3, Get-ChildItem is smart enough to do that for you: Get-ChildItem $env:windir -File Get-ChildItem $env:windir –Directory
Continue ReadingPowerShell: Restarting Computers
In PowerShell v3, Restart-Computer now has a number of useful new parameters. For example, you can restart a remote machine and wait for the reboot process to finish. -Wait: Halts the script until the machine has rebooted -Timeout: Seconds to wait for the machine to restart -For: Considers the computer to have restarted when the…
Continue ReadingPowerShell: Colorizing PowerShell ISE v3
The new PowerShell ISE script editor in PowerShell v3 lets you customize a lot of colors, so if a particular color does not show well on a projector, for example, simply change it. You can do that via GUI, but you can also do it programmatically. For example, from your profile script: $psISE.Options.RestoreDefaultConsoleTokenColors $psISE.Options.RestoreDefaultTokenColors $psISE.Options.RestoreDefaultXmlTokenColors…
Continue ReadingHighly Valued Soft Skills for IT Professionals
Depending on which company you talk to, there are varying demands for IT technical skills. But there is one common need that most IT organizations have: soft skills. This need is nothing new. As early as three decades ago corporate IT sought out liberal arts graduates to become business and systems analysts so they could…
Continue ReadingPowerShell: Getting Relative Dates
Here’s a quick and fast way of generating relative dates in any format: (Get-Date).AddDays(-1).ToString(‘yyyy-MM-dd’) This would return yesterday’s date in the format year-month-day. Remove the ToString() method if you want the relative date as a true DateTime object. This returns all error events from the System event log in the past 48 hours: Get-EventLog -LogName…
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