Powershell – Part 5 – Regular Expressions, oh my!

A lot of people get intimidated by Regular Expressions, and maybe you should.  However, if you plan on doing any type of text manipulation or searching you will need to learn the basics.  Administrator tasks are littered with getting dumps of data into text form and having to extract, reformat, or find a way to [...]

Powershell – Part 4 – Arrays and For Loops

Arrays For those that have never worked with arrays here’s a great way to understand them:  If a variable is a piece of paper then the stack of papers is an array.  It’s a list of variables or objects, and every programming/scripting language has ways to store these variables or objects linearly so you can [...]

Powershell – Part 3 – Variables

Time to learn some more basics.  In our last tutorial we looked at some of the special variables given to us within Powershell, but now it’s time to discuss how user variables work.  Let’s start off simply. $var1 = ‘blahblahblah’ $var1 By using the $ before the word var1 we’ve created a variable.  Using the [...]

Powershell – Part 2: Opening files, writing to the screen, the pipeline, and dot values

I have found that a great place to start learning a scripting language is by writing scripts to solve word problems.  File input and output operations, text manipulation, variables, arrays, and hashes all need to be understood in order to accomplish a goal like, “find all the 5-letter words in the English language that are [...]

Powershell – Part 1

Start at the beginning.  Powershell can be run via: start->run->powershell Say hello to your new blue and white friend.  My hope is to build from post to post and teach what I learn day-to-day as I attempt to migrate from perl scripts to powershell. Powershell retains the commands that are available in most shells like [...]