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 There are many useful posts in this blog, so we keep the blog here for historical reference. However, some information might be very outdated and many of the links might not work anymore.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

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...

PowerShell PowerTip: What you should know about streams

July 10, 2018 Jul 10, 2018 07/10/18

Kory Thacher

PowerShell has a concept called Streams, which are the different places data can go (output, error, verbose, etc). You usually don't have to worry too much about these streams if you're just writing simple scripts, but it helps a ton to know: What this means for you, as users, is that you can get a non-terminating error, and ...

Regular Expressions (REGEX): Introduction

July 5, 2018 Jul 5, 2018 07/5/18

Kory Thacher

Hi all, this week I'll be talking about Regular Expressions. I've got a few posts planned to get you set up and going with some basic Regex. Regex is used for extracting and validating data. Essentially, you can think of Regex as windows wild cards on steroids. Anytime we need to match data with a little more clarity than the *s and ?s ...

PowerShell PowerTip: Checking your PowerShell version

June 26, 2018 Jun 26, 2018 06/26/18

Kory Thacher

If there is one question I could say I get the most in PowerShell, it is: How do I check my version? Its not a hard thing, but its not an obvious thing. We can actually check our version with a build in variable called PSVersionTable Hope that helps, tune in more often to get short and sweet PowerTips...

Scripting Blog [archived]

PowerShell - Scripting Blog [archived]