FAQ Archives | PowerShell

Same Command. Different Return Types.

PowerShell TeamDecember 10, 2010Dec 10, 201012/10/10

My command seems to behave differently depending on how many items were returned. This is something that the PowerShell Team hears from the community or our internal partners every couple of weeks. This blog post will explain when a Windows PowerShell command returns different types and offer some reasons for why it is done this way. In gen

Installing PowerShell on Vista/"Longhorn" Server

PowerShell TeamMarch 8, 2007Mar 8, 200703/8/07

1. I am new to PowerShell and would like to install it on my Vista machine. The following page http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/management/powershell/download.mspx gives you links to various PowerShell downloads. Choose the one that best matches your operating system, platform an

Why Can’t I Pipe Format-Table to Export-Csv (and get something useful)?

PowerShell TeamMarch 7, 2007Mar 7, 200703/7/07

Ken's PowerShell blog has an entry Remote Services and PowerShell where he wrote a function to get services from a remote machine using WMI. He formatted the data using FT (format-table) and then went on to export the data to CSV. He pointed out that the following would NOT work rget-service remotemachinename netlogon | ft -autosize name,sta

Why isn’t “New-Object” aliased to “New”

PowerShell TeamFebruary 23, 2007Feb 23, 200702/23/07

Alistair Young made a Note to Self : In a standard PowerShell installation, "new" is not an alias for "new-object". You added that. You should therefore know better that to make this kind of dumbass mistake. We talked about making "New" an alias to "New-Object" but decided against it in the end because it leaves open the door for us to provide

PowerShell Cheat Sheet Redux – the PDF version

PowerShell TeamJanuary 24, 2007Jan 24, 200701/24/07

Attached is a PDF version of Ben Pearce's PowerShell Cheat Sheet. In the past I've encouraged everyone to speak up and complain if we were messing up or not giving you what you needed. I'm pleased to see that you have taken this to heart (seriously). Ben and every other Microsoft employee has been using

PowerShell Cheat Sheet

PowerShell TeamJanuary 24, 2007Jan 24, 200701/24/07

Ben Pearce was gracious enough to put together a good looking PowerShell Cheat Sheet which I've included as an attachment to this blog post. By definition, a cheat sheet is incomplete so this contains the things that Ben has found to be the most import. I think you'll find it useful. Cheers! Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]Win

Windows PowerShell Exit Codes

PowerShell TeamOctober 14, 2006Oct 14, 200610/14/06

Windows PowerShell Exit Codes PSMDTAG:FAQ: How can my script control the PowerShell exit code? Answers: 1. A normal termination will set the exitcode to 0 2. An uncaught THROW will set the exitcode to 1 3. The EXIT statement will stop the proc

The Wonders of Date Math using Windows PowerShell

PowerShell TeamSeptember 17, 2006Sep 17, 200609/17/06

Larry Hayden posted a query about dates at:http://techtasks.com/bookmarks/powershell/2006/09/interview-with-a-scripter-jeffrey-snover/ He has a script which gets all the Application Events that happened TODAY: ————————————————————$today = [DateTime]::Today$Events = Get-Eventlog -New 1024 Application | Wh

ErrorLevel equivalent

PowerShell TeamSeptember 15, 2006Sep 15, 200609/15/06

PSMDTAG:FAQ: ErrorLevel - what is the PowerShell equivalent? In Cmd.exe, %ErrorLevel% is a builtin variable which indicates the success or failure of the last executable run. In PowerShell, we support: $? Contains True if last operation succeeded and False otherwise.And &n

DateTime Utility Functions

PowerShell TeamSeptember 6, 2006Sep 6, 200609/6/06

I often want to find things that happened Today. For instance, which files got changed today. Windows PowerShell makes this easy to do but it can be a bit verbose and I do it a lot so I've added a function to my profile: IsToday. function isToday ([datetime]$date) {[datetime]::Now.Date -eq $date.Date} This takes a

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