Have you ever found yourself asking the question, "where did THAT come from?"?<\/p>\n
In PowerShell we try to give you mechanisms you can use to answer questions like that. We spend extra resources (memory, cpu cycles, etc) to do this because we focus in the performance of the PEOPLE using our software instead of the performance of the code. When something goes pear-shaped, what matters is how quickly a person can figure out what is going on and fix it. <\/p>\n
We’ve talked quite bit about this in the context of the rich error information we gather but in this blog I’m going to discuss another V1 feature and then tell you about ANOTHER one of my favorite V2isms. <\/p>\n
You know that variables are exposed as a drive and you can do things like:<\/p>\n
PS> dir Variable:s* <\/font><\/p>\n Name Value <\/p>\n Bug have you have tried this:<\/p>\n PS> dir Variable:s* |ft Name,Description<\/font><\/strong> -auto <\/font><\/p>\n Name Description <\/p>\n Did you know about that? There is a lot more to variables than meets the eye! You can provide a description with a variable by using Set-Variable<\/p>\n PS> Set-Variable X 15 -Description "This is a test" Name : x <\/p>\n That has existed since PowerShell V1 but what we never were able to answer is – where did that function<\/strong> come from? <\/p>\n When I start PowerShell, I dot-source a number of scripts which define functions as part of my session. Occasionally, I’ll decide that I want a function to do something different. But then the question is, what file was the function defined in? There was never a good way to answer that question. That all changes in PowerShell V2.<\/p>\n In V2, we have extended the SCRIPTBLOCK object to include the FILE where the script was defined. One of the tricks you need to learn is that to get all the information about a Scriptblock, you need to use the -FORCE flag on the formatting commands.<\/p>\n [4376:0]PS> (dir function:prompt ).scriptblock |fl * <\/font><\/p>\n if ($PSDebugContext) [4376:0]PS> (dir function:prompt ).scriptblock |fl * -force<\/font><\/strong> <\/font><\/p>\n IsFilter : False <\/font><\/p>\n Now that you know it is there, you can just access it directly:<\/p>\n [4376:0]PS> (dir function:prompt ).scriptblock.file <\/font><\/p>\n PSMDTAG:FAQ: How do I tell where a function was defined? <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Experiment! Enjoy! Engage! <\/p>\n Jeffrey Snover [MSFT] Have you ever found yourself asking the question, "where did THAT come from?"? In PowerShell we try to give you mechanisms you can use to answer questions like that. We spend extra resources (memory, cpu cycles, etc) to do this because we focus in the performance of the PEOPLE using our software instead of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":600,"featured_media":13641,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-powershell"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":" Have you ever found yourself asking the question, "where did THAT come from?"? In PowerShell we try to give you mechanisms you can use to answer questions like that. We spend extra resources (memory, cpu cycles, etc) to do this because we focus in the performance of the PEOPLE using our software instead of the […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/600"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4421\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
—- —–
ShellId Microsoft.PowerShell<\/font><\/p>\n
—- ———–
ShellId The ShellID identifies the current shell. This is used by #Requires.
StackTrace<\/font><\/p>\n
PS> Get-Variable x |fl * <\/font><\/p>\n
Description : This is a test
Value : 15
Visibility : Public
Module :
ModuleName :
Options : None
Attributes : {}<\/font><\/p>\n
{ "DBG>"
}
else
{
"[{0}:{1}]PS> " -f $PID, $NestedPromptLevel
} <\/font><\/p>\n
StartPosition : System.Management.Automation.PSToken
File : D:\\ps\\profile.ps1
<\/font><\/strong>Attributes : {}
Module :<\/font><\/p>\n
D:\\ps\\profile.ps1<\/font><\/p>\n
(dir function:X).ScriptBlock.File<\/p>\n
Windows Management Partner Architect
Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at: http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/PowerShell<\/a>
Visit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at: http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/technet\/scriptcenter\/hubs\/msh.mspx<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"