FAQ - PowerShell Team

Flexible pipelining with ScriptBlock Parameters

PowerShell Team June 23, 2006 Jun 23, 2006 06/23/06

PSMDTAG:FAQ: How can I pipeline data to a parameter which does not accept pipeline input?PSMDTAG:FAQ: What are ScriptBlock Parameters? One of the foundation concepts of Windows PowerShell is pipelining objects instead of text. What happens is that when an upstream command generates an object, the PowerShell engine examines the data ...

More – How does PowerShell formatting really work?

PowerShell Team June 21, 2006 Jun 21, 2006 06/21/06

<Edited 7/2/2006 with tags and categories>PSMDTAG:FAQ: Why doesn't output expand when I expand the width of the console?PSMDTAG:FAQ: Why doesn't output expand when I use -noElements on GROUP? Consider the example: PS> gps |group company Count Name &...

$ERRORVIEW="CATEGORYVIEW"

PowerShell Team June 21, 2006 Jun 21, 2006 06/21/06

<Edited 7/2/2006 with tags and categories>PSMDTAG:FAQ: What is $ErrorView?PSMDTAG:FAQ: How do I get error details? Have you tried out $ErrorView="CategoryView" yet? Remember - errors are just objects. Given that they are objects, we render a subset of their properties to the console. We provide 2 views: ...

Using Format Control Strings.

PowerShell Team June 16, 2006 Jun 16, 2006 06/16/06

PSMDTAG:FAQ: How do I display large numbers with commas?PSMDTAG:FAQ: How do I use .NET formatting strings? As scripters, we often spend tons of times trying to get our data formated just the right way. Often this is an error-prone, frustrating experience. Windows PowerShell leverages .NET objects to make this task a ton simpler.&...

Programmatic way to get valid string values for a parameter

PowerShell Team May 9, 2006 May 9, 2006 05/9/06

<WIZARD WARNING> ISVs and Tool vendors may find this important, Advanced users may find this interesting, Casual users may want to skip this. Someone asked me if there was a programmatic way to tell what the legal values for a string parameter to a cmdlet was. The example was OUT-FILE -ENCODING xxx Out current help doesn...

Filing Bugs

PowerShell Team May 8, 2006 May 8, 2006 05/8/06

With the release of RC1 of PowerShell, we've closed down on doing much feature work and are primarily polishing the product. This means fixing bugs, cleaning up usability issues, and really making sure this is a quality product. For those of you unfamiliar with Microsoft's milestone naming terminology, RC1 stands for Release Candidate 1. This ...

Invoking PowerShell with complex expressions using Scriptblocks

PowerShell Team May 7, 2006 May 7, 2006 05/7/06

<WIZARD WARNING> First a reminder: when you are in PowerShell (formerly knows as Monad), you can run anything you want out-of-process using the construct: PowerShell {Scriptblock} The great example of this is PS> #RUN EVERYTHING IN PROCESSPS> get-process |where {$_.handles -ge 900} |sort handles Handles NPM(K) &...

em dash, en dash, dash, dash, dash…

PowerShell Team May 2, 2006 May 2, 2006 05/2/06

Some people have noticed that you can paste examples out of Word documents directly into a PowerShell session. Given all of the typographic tricks that Word does, this is actually much harder than it sounds. Here’s what we do. There's a piece of code in the interpreter that takes each of the possible characters and maps it into the ...

The new TabExpansion feature…

PowerShell Team April 26, 2006 Apr 26, 2006 04/26/06

One of the nicest new features in the latest drop of Windows PowerShell is enhanced tab-completion. We now tab-complete properties on variables and parameters on cmdlets in addition to the old filename completion. But that's not the interesting part. The cool bit is that it's done through a user-definable function. In the same way that you can...

How to Access or Modify StartUp Items in the Window Registry

PowerShell Team April 25, 2006 Apr 25, 2006 04/25/06

Some applications launch themselves whenever you start your computer and load Windows. In most cases, this is the desired behavior. However in some instances, malicious programs such as spyware, Trojans, worms, viruses load in this manner and hijack your computer. It is important to stay vigilant and periodically monitor your ...

PowerShell Team