PowerShell Tips

Tech Talk Tuesday
August 28th, 2018

My Past

• Linux since 2000
• MacBook
• Automation
• Scripting

It's a Windows World

• Denial
• Anger
• Bargaining
• Depression
• Acceptance

Topics

• Editors
• Pipelining
• Object Conversion
• Loops and Filters
• Hidden Gems

Editors

• PowerShell ISE
• VS Code
• Notepad
• Notepad++
• Others

Beware integrated consoles!!!

Pipelining

• Chaining simple commands
• Formatting
• Use variables if too long/complex

Invoke-RestMethod `
 -Uri https://api.github.com/users/brendonthiede/repos `
  | Sort-Object updated_at `
  | Format-Table -Property clone_url,updated_at

Object Conversion

• PowerShell native objects
• JSON built-ins

("{'Name': 'Brendon', 'Details': {'Job': 'DevOps Engineer'}}" `
  | ConvertFrom-Json).Details.Job

(@{Name="Brendon";Details=@{Job="DevOps Engineer"}}).Details.Job

Loops and Filters

$ObjArray = @(@{Name="Brendon";Details=@{Job="DevOps Engineer"}};@{Name="Tom";Details=@{Job="Operations"}};@{Name="Tom";Details=@{Job="DevOps Engineer"}})

$ObjArray | `
  Where-Object {
    $_.Details.Job -eq "DevOps Engineer"
  } | ForEach-Object {
    Write-Output $_.Name
  }

1..10 | `
  ForEach-Object {
    Write-Output $_
  }

Hidden Gems

• Save your place: Push-Location/Pop-Location
• Environment variables: Get-ChildItem env:
• .Net Code: [System.IO.Compression.ZipFile]::CreateFromDirectory("C:\tmp", "C:\tmp.zip")