I Love Powershell

Archive for July, 2010

Here’s a great piece of profile customization: Make your PowerShell session have a dark red background each time it starts a session running as an administrator.

To do this, I look the built in $host variable, which has several properties in it, such as the foreground color and the background color of the shell.  Here’s the difference between a PowerShell session running in normal mode (blue screen) vs. administrator mode (red screen)

Blue background on regular session

Red background on an administrative session

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Excellent profile customization.  I use this one myself, and honestly it’s my favorite one.  Keeps my head in the right place.

This PowerShell profile customization is simple and sweet:  Go grab a webpage source; parse the lines to get to the juice; display a daily bible verse on my PowerShell console.

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If you want a fast way to get information about the uninstallers that are listed in the registry, then check out this simple script to parse out some information for you. 

This little baby asks you for a search term, then grabs the pertinent software uninstall information out of the HKey Local Machine registry hive.

It’s simple and effective,  and I put it together in just a couple of minutes.  It could stand to have some polish on it, but it does the job and it does it like now!

Would you improve it?  How?  Comments are open.

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Alright, so you’ve built up your skills, developed your script, got all the kinks worked out and now it’s time to set the sucker up to do your work for you.  I know, I’ve been there myself.

This tutorial shows you how to setup a scheduled task to run your PowerShell scripts’

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If you need to automate a task to create a file once a day, this PowerShell tutorial will help.

This problem is handled in 2 parts:  Doing the task you want to do; and saving the output.

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The need:  To run multiple PowerShell windows and keep it straight which one is working on what.

Example:

1. In PowerShell window #1 you’re working with SharePoint
2. In PowerShell window #2 you’re working with Active Directory users
3. In PowerShell window #3 you’re goofing off customizing your profile so you can write a blog post

Only problem is, once you’re working with these windows, it’s hard to tell which window was the one you are working on your profile in – because they all look like this:

Here’s how to alleviate this problem automatically using an awesome PowerShell profile trick

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