Richard Siddaway's Blog

Background jobs were one of the most undervalued aspects of PowerShell v2. With the introduction of PowerShell v3 we get ways to schedule those jobs. In this post though I want to look at the new CIM cmdlets and jobs. Using the WMI cmdlets most PowerShell users have done something like this: PS> Get-WmiObject -Class […]

Every time I look at PowerShell v3 I seem to find a new way to access WMI! I’ve covered the –ComputerName and –CimSession parameters before but to recap We duplicate the way Get-WmiObject works: $computer = $env:COMPUTERNAME Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_OperatingSystem -ComputerName $computer   We can use CIM sessions $cs = New-CimSession -ComputerName $computer Get-CimInstance -ClassName […]

I have a number of  virtual machines running Windows 2008 R2 and I upgraded one of them to Windows 2012 – an over the top upgrade rather than a format and clean install I found that Get-PSSession –Computername didn’t work against that machine. This parameter now looks at the remote machine endpoint and gets all […]

Advanced notice that there will be a Games next year – its changing a bit though.  See http://powershell.org/games/

The new –showwindow parameter in Get-Help pops up a little window containing the FULL help file.  Much better than having to rememebr to use –full.  PowerShell immediately returns the prompt so you can continue working – means you can have a number of help files open simultaneously. Get-Help -Name Get-Process –ShowWindow This gets to be […]

Want to change an attribute on all members of an Active Directory group.  Then try this Get-ADGroupMember -Identity Legal | where {$_.objectclass -eq "user"} | foreach { Set-ADUser -Identity $($_.distinguishedName) -Department "Student" } Get the group members – filter out nested groups by checking the objectclass of the object. For each user set the attribute. […]

In the previous post we looked at how to read the mounted device information. The data is in binary though – if you want it readable and not all of it is readable – try this $data = @() Get-Item -Path HKLM:\SYSTEM\MountedDevices | select -ExpandProperty Property | where {$_ -like "\Dos*"} | foreach { $name […]

Interesting question about reading the registry.  How do you read HKLM:\SYSTEM\MountedDevices and pull out the name of the device and the associated data. Get-Item -Path HKLM:\SYSTEM\MountedDevices returns data of this form Name                           Property —-                           ——– MountedDevices                 \DosDevices\C: : {218, 187, 32, 142…}                                \DosDevices\G: : {92, 0, 63, 0…}                                \DosDevices\E: : {95, 0, 63, […]

There seems to be a bit of cofusion about how Get-Random works. Try this 1..10 | foreach {Get-Random} you’ll get  randomly selected 32-bit unsigned integer between 0 (zero) and Int32.MaxValue (0x7FFFFFFF, 2,147,483,647). The –Minimum parameter sets a minimum value – you will not get any values BELOW this try this 1..10 | foreach {Get-Random -Minimum […]

The dates for the summit have been announced – 22-24 April 2013 @ Microsoft campus Redmond You can register at http://powershell.org/summit 1/7 th of the tickets have already gone – don’t miss out.