{"id":73141,"date":"2015-09-25T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2015-09-25T00:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.technet.microsoft.com\/heyscriptingguy\/2015\/09\/25\/a-tale-of-two-powershell-cmdlets\/"},"modified":"2019-02-18T09:35:07","modified_gmt":"2019-02-18T16:35:07","slug":"a-tale-of-two-powershell-cmdlets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/a-tale-of-two-powershell-cmdlets\/","title":{"rendered":"A Tale of Two PowerShell Cmdlets"},"content":{"rendered":"

Summary<\/b>: Ed Wilson, Microsoft Scripting Guy, talks about using Windows PowerShell to explore classic event logs.<\/span><\/p>\n

Microsoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson, is here. When you get to version five of anything, you already begin to see signs on strain and pain. I mean, take Windows NT 5.0, for example. Oh yeah. That one was delayed for about five years, and it eventually became Windows 2000.<\/p>\n

Part of the reason is that no matter how good the original version or vision was, things change. Priorities change. And more often than not, computers and technology change. Often, it is easier to create a new tool, than to retrofit an old tool. But you can’t just give up on the old tool, so you end up with two (or more) tools that do the same job, only differently.<\/p>\n

In Windows PowerShell, there are at least five ways of querying event logs. I am not going to catalogue them here, nor am I going to mention them all. but if you have been scripting for very long, you can probably figure them out for yourself. This is because several techniques that you may have used in other scripting languages (such as VBScript) remain valid in Windows PowerShell.<\/p>\n

But even “native” Windows PowerShell has two clearly defined ways of querying event logs:<\/p>\n