Richard Siddaway's Blog

The book is over half way through the author review process. This means that the editor has corrected my English and the technical reviewer has made his comments and I get to read all of this and revise as necessary. Soon be done at this rate Technorati Tags: PowerShell,Books

Don’t forget the User group Live Meeting on Tuesday 2 March at 7.30 GMT. Details from http://msmvps.com/blogs/richardsiddaway/archive/2010/02/13/ug-meeting-2-march-2010.aspx Technorati Tags: PowerShell,User Group

I was thinking about testing machines for when they were last patched and remembered that Get-Hotfix displays the Installed date for patches.  Unfortunately, it isn’t available for all patches so we can’t get a guaranteed last date of patching by this method.  However, we do get something close and if the script shows a date […]

Special folders are things like Favourites, Desktop and StartMenu folders.  The Mount-SpecialFolder mounts one specified special folder or all special folders.  The folders involved can be found by using the .NET enumeration used to discover them. PS>  [Enum]::GetValues([Environment+SpecialFolder]) Desktop Programs Personal Personal Favorites Startup Recent SendTo StartMenu MyMusic DesktopDirectory MyComputer Templates ApplicationData LocalApplicationData InternetCache Cookies […]

The Filesystem module has some interesting things for us.  The get-freediskspace function looked useful – so I tried it. It is safe so you can try this at home PS> Get-FreeDiskSpace Timestamp                 CounterSamples ———                 ————– 25/02/2010 22:13:44       \\rslaptop01\logicaldisk(harddiskvolume1)\% free space :                           71.7171717171717                           \\rslaptop01\logicaldisk(c:)\% free space :                           64.7910448672172                           \\rslaptop01\logicaldisk(d:)\% free space : […]

  Have you ever read Help that wasn’t really helpful? Here’s your chance to fix it. The Windows PowerShell documentation team and PowerShellCommunity.org jointly sponsor the Windows PowerShell Community Doc Review. As a member, you’ll get to read and comment on the Help docs before they’re published, and work with the writers, editors, and the […]

If all you want is an empty zip file for future use then import the filesystem module from the powershell pack and use New-Zip -Path test3.zip   In case you were wondering copy-tozip uses it in the background when it creates a zip file Technorati Tags: PowerShell,pack

The PowerShell pack is part of the Windows 7 resource kit and is also available as a separate download.  The Filesystem module contains the following functions: Copy-ToZip Get-DuplicateFile Get-FreeDiskSpace Get-SHA1 Mount-SpecialFolder New-Zip Rename-Drive Resolve-ShortcutFile Start-FileSystemWatcher   Copy-ToZip does what it says and copies files into a .zip archive.  If the archive doesn’t exist it will […]

I came across this post http://blogs.msdn.com/dtjones/archive/2010/01/06/what-makes-a-strong-community.aspx that talks about the SQL Server community – if you replace SQL Server with PowerShell I think the post is even more valid. According to the post the two things that make a strong community are: the ability to get questions answered – quickly and with quality answers the […]

Secure Strings are a way to work with encrypted data – one of the common uses is to protect passwords used in scripts.  The way to use them may not be obvious at first sight.  I hope to clear some of the confusion around them in this post. A common technique when asking for a […]