I blogged a few days ago about taking advantage of PowerShell’s history. As I was looking at the history object I noticed the ExecutionStatus property. Most of the time it should be “completed”. But what about commands that failed? Why not search my history buffer?
Category: Windows PowerShell
Fun with Debug Messages
In my script and function development, I often add the line $DebugPreference=”SilentlyContinue” to the beginning of my code. Throughout the script I add lines using Write-Debug that tell me what the script is doing or the value of a particular variable. This has been very helpful. When I want to see the debug messages, I set $DebugPreference to “Continue” and voila!. In PrimalScript all the messages are written to the debug panel. But I wanted more .
Fun with History
In the Pixar film Cars, Mater demonstrates to Lightning McQueen how to drive backwards. Lightning is astounded. Mater explains, “Don’t need to know where I’m going as long as I know where I’ve been.” Probably not the exact quote but the point is if you know what you’ve done or where you’ve been it makes it very easy to know where you’re going or what to do next. In PowerShell you can take advantage of the shell’s history objects to speed up what you want to do next.
Export-PSCredential
Hal Rottenberg has put together a very nice set of functions for exporting and importing PSCredential to a file. The export function takes a PSCredential and serializes it to an XML file. The corresponding import function reconstitutes the PSCredential to an object that you can use. Now before you start freaking out about security, the xml file can only be used by the same user account that created it.
What I like about this is that I can now have multiple credentials easily stored for different computers. I’m no longer tied to using one credential.
Windows PowerShell ADVANCED Online Training
Registration for the last online training course, possibly for the rest of 2008, ends this Wednesday 7/23/2008 at 12:00PM PST.
Managing Active Directory Sample Chapter
We’ve posted a sample chapter for Managing Active Directory with Windows PowerShell: TFM. There is also a Table of Contents if you want to see what how I’ve been spending my time.
Fun with Errors
In the online PowerShell class I’ve been doing this week we’ve been discussing error handling. I explained that the built-in $error variable is an array that stores recent PowerShell exceptions. Here’s a quick list of fun things you can do with an error object.
Clean Temp With PowerShell
You would think that by now Windows and Windows applications would be much better about cleaning up temporary files. But no. It is amazing how many files I still see in my %TEMP% directory. I’ve always operated under the assumption that any file in %TEMP% that was created or earlier than the time I last booted up is fair game for deletion. I finally got around to using PowerShell for this management task.
Resolved! Conflict between PrimalScript and PSCX
If you use PrimalScript and the PowerShell Community Extensions, you may have experienced a conflict between the two, especially if you are using the default PSCX profile. Thanks to PowerShell MVP Oisin Grehan for pointing out a fix: Look for the line in your Pscx installed $profile that says:Start-TabExpansionand comment it out with a #. […]
Analyze-Packet
If you’ve been trying out the Get-Packet script you’ve seen that there is a great deal of information. I wanted an easy way to analyze the data so I put together a script called Analyze-Packet that will slice and dice a saved network trace and produce a summary report.
