PowerShell Cookbook: Your Complete Guide to Scripting the Ubiquitous Object-Based Shell

How do you use PowerShell to navigate the filesystem, manage files and folders, or retrieve a web page?

This introduction to the PowerShell language and scripting environment provides more than 400 task-oriented recipes to help you solve all kinds of problems. Intermediate to advanced system administrators will find more than 100 tried-and-tested scripts they can copy and use immediately.

Updated for PowerShell 5.1 and Open Source PowerShell up to 7.0 and beyond, this comprehensive cookbook includes hands-on recipes for common tasks and administrative jobs that you can apply whether you're on the client or server version of Windows. You also get quick references to technologies used in conjunction with PowerShell, including regular expressions, the XPath language, format specifiers, and frequently referenced .NET, COM, and WMI classes.

• Learn how to use PowerShell on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019
• Tour PowerShell's core features, including the command model, object-based pipeline, and ubiquitous scripting
• Master fundamentals such as the interactive shell, pipeline, and object concepts
• Perform common tasks that involve working with files, internet-connected scripts, user interaction, and more
• Solve tasks in systems and enterprise management, such as working with Active Directory and the filesystem

From the Preface

Who This Book Is For?

This book helps you use PowerShell to get things done. It contains hundreds of solutions to specific, real-world problems. For systems management, you’ll find plenty of examples that show how to manage the filesystem, the Windows Registry, event logs, processes, and more. For enterprise administration, you’ll find two entire chapters devoted to Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), Active Directory, and other enterprise-focused tasks.

Along the way, you’ll also learn an enormous amount about PowerShell: its features, its commands, and its scripting language—but most importantly, you’ll solve problems.

What You Need to Use This Book

The majority of this book requires only a working installation of PowerShell. All supported versions of Windows (Windows 7 and beyond, as well as Windows Server 2012 and beyond) include Windows PowerShell by default.

A significant step up from this default installation, however, is the open source PowerShell Core. You can learn more about upgrading to PowerShell Core (or simply PowerShell) in Recipe 1.1.

The Active Directory scripts given in Chapter 26 are most useful when applied to an enterprise environment, but Recipe 26.1 shows how to install additional software (Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services, or Active Directory Application Mode) that lets you run these scripts against a local installation.

About the Author