Richard Siddaway's Blog

One problem that comes up quite often is how do you get folder sizes. One option is use Measure-Object but the problem with that approach is that its going to be a pretty slow process if you have a lot of folders. PowerShell doesn’t have a method of directly getting the folder size and you […]

A Windows Update module is available on Windows versions 1709 and later. This includes Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, Windows Server 1709 and Windows Insider previews (Server and Client) post the 1709 release. The module supplies the following cmdlets Get-WUAVersion Get-WUIsPendingReboot Get-WULastInstallationDate Get-WULastScanSuccessDate Install-WUUpdates Start-WUScan The module is a CDXML module based on the root/Microsoft/Windows/WindowsUpdate/MSFT_WUOperations […]

Interesting question on the forum about finding the manager for a given user in AD – assuming the Manager field is populated of course. If you’ve not worked with the AD cmdlets this is a good introduction to some of their quirks. This is how you get an AD user’s manager.   You need the […]

One new feature of PowerShell v6 (its actually been available since alpha 13 but I’d missed it) is the Get-Uptime cmdlet   PS C:\scripts> Get-Uptime Days              : 0 Hours             : 2 Minutes           : 57 Seconds           : 6 Milliseconds      : 0 Ticks             : 106260000000 TotalDays         : 0.122986111111111 TotalHours        : 2.95166666666667 TotalMinutes      : 177.1 TotalSeconds      : 10626 […]

Windows PowerShell (v1-v5.1) has always used profiles to configure your PowerShell session.  You need execution policy set to something other than restricted so that the profile script can run.   You can have up to 4 profiles: Description                Path ———–                —- Current User, Current Host $Home\[My ]Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Profile.ps1 Current User, All Hosts    $Home\[My ]Documents\Profile.ps1 All Users, […]

The PowerShell team have announced the availability of the PowerShell v6 release candidate. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/powershell/2017/11/17/powershell-core-6-release-candidate/   A release candidate is just about done with only bugs to resolve – in other words about what you can expect in the final delivery.   Some work is still required – https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+milestone%3A6.0.0-GA   The full release of PowerShell 6.0 […]

I’m doing some work requiring containers and decided to use Server 1709 as it has some significant changes when compared to Server 2016. The documentation – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowscontainers/about/ – just gives options for Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server Insider Preview. As 1709 is the shipping version of the Insider Preview I decided that should work. […]

When Windows Server 2016 was introduced a very nice CIM class was provided to work with Windows Updates. If you wanted to scan for available updates you could do something like this: $ci = New-CimInstance -Namespace root/Microsoft/Windows/WindowsUpdate -ClassName MSFT_WUOperationsSession  <br>$result = $ci | Invoke-CimMethod -MethodName ScanForUpdates -Arguments @{SearchCriteria=”IsInstalled=0″;OnlineScan=$true} <br>$result.Updates   Unfortunately, if you try this […]

When is PowerShell not PowerShell? When its PowerShell v6.   This applies to beta 9 and later   Check a v6 instance PS C:\Program Files\PowerShell\6.0.0-beta.9> $PSVersionTable Name                           Value —-                           —– PSVersion                      6.0.0-beta.9 PSEdition                      Core GitCommitId                    v6.0.0-beta.9 OS                             Microsoft Windows 10.0.17035 Platform                       Win32NT PSCompatibleVersions           {1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0…} PSRemotingProtocolVersion      2.3 SerializationVersion           1.1.0.1 WSManStackVersion              3.0 Now try […]

Depending on the version of Windows you’re running you could be using PowerShell version 1 through version 5.1 (admittedly I suspect there are very few people, if any, still running PowerShell v1). This is complicated by the various versions of Windows Management Framework that are available for download and the large number of alpha and […]