The “Hey, Scripting Guys!” blog has been retired. There are many useful posts in this blog, so we keep the blog here for historical reference. However, some information might be very outdated and many of the links might not work anymore.

New PowerShell content is being posted to the PowerShell Community blog where members of the community can create posts by submitting content in the GitHub repository.

Scripting Blog [archived]

Formerly known as the "Hey, Scripting Guy!" blog

PowerShell PowerTip: History of commands with PSReadline

August 7, 2018 Aug 7, 2018 08/7/18

Kory Thacher

One of the really cool things PSReadline provides (module shipping on v5+) isn't as immediately obvious as the syntax highlighting. It offers a persistent history that is stored from session to session. This means if you run commands in a window, close it, and open a new one later you can still hit the up arrow and scroll through them. I ...

Regular Expressions (REGEX): Basic symbols

July 31, 2018 Jul 31, 2018 07/31/18

Kory Thacher

Welcome back to the RegEx guide. Last post we talked a little bit about the basics of RegEx and its uses. I mentioned the most important thing is to understand the symbols. Today we'll ease in with some of the basics to get us going, but later we will expand on these and see some other options we have. is used to represent any single ...

PowerShell PowerTip: What is the point of Out-Variable?

July 24, 2018 Jul 24, 2018 07/24/18

Kory Thacher

A lot of times people see others using the common parameter -OutVariable instead of the best practice $var = <value>. This leads to a lot of folks wondering why OutVariable exists. The real use for OutVariable is to save your data off, while still letting it get sent along the output stream. What this means is that you could use it...