On Preferences and Scopes

Progress in PowerShell: a tale of Verbosity and other preferences with lessons in Scopes and Proxies thrown in It started, as these things often do, with someone complaining. In PowerShell Version 7.2 the output of Invoke-WebRequest -Verbose and Invoke-RestMethod -Verbose look like this: In all the earlier versions they look like the ...

How to Preview PowerShell Scripts In PowerShell

Q: When I use Windows Explorer and select a PowerShell script file - I do not see the script in the preview window. Can I fix that? A: You can make a few simple registry updates and do just what you want! At some time in the deep and distant past, Windows Explorer gained the preview pane feature. The idea is simple: you select a file in ...

How to Use $PSDefaultParameterValues

Q: When I use cmdlets like Receive-Job and Format-Table, how do I change default values of the Keep and Wrap parameters? A: Use the $PSDefaultValues automatic variable. When I first discovered PowerShell's background jobs feature, I would use Receive-Job to view job output - only to discover it's no longer there. And almost too often to ...

How to Use $FormatEnumerationLimit

Q: When I format an object where a property contains more than 4 objects, I never see the extra property values. How can I fix that? A: Use the $FormatEnumerationLimit variable. This query is one I hear in many PowerShell support forums, and I have encountered this issue a lot over the years. What happens is that you issue a command to ...