Monthly Archives: September 2007

Windows PowerShell is based on the .NET Framework.  That is, it is built using the .NET Framework and it exposes the .NET Framework to the user.  One very nice feature of the .NET Framework is the Regex class in the System.Text.RegularExpressions namespace.  … Continue reading →

In the last post Effective Powershell Item 7: Understanding "Output", we covered a lot about PowerShell output.  However there is a bit more you need to understand to use PowerShell effectively.  This post concerns the cardinality of PowerShell output.  That … Continue reading →

In shells that you may have used in the past, everything that appears on the stdout and stderr streams is considered "the output".  In these other shells you can typically redirect stdout to a file using the redirect operator ‘>’.  And … Continue reading →

To use Windows PowerShell pipes effectively, it really helps to know what objects are flowing down the pipe.  Sometimes objects get transformed from one type to another.  Without the ability to inspect what type is being used at each stage … Continue reading →

Windows PowerShell is like most dynamic languages in that it allows you to use a variable without declaring its type and without having assigned to it.  This is handy for interactive use, you can do stuff like this: PS C:\Temp> … Continue reading →

OK the last couple of items have been long.  I promise a short one here.  Windows PowerShell doesn’t provide multiline comments.  Multiline comments come in handy when you need to comment out multiple lines in a script file.  However there is a reasonable … Continue reading →

I have mentioned previously that Windows PowerShell serves up .NET objects for most everything.  Get-ChildItem (alias Dir) outputs a sequence of System.IO.FileInfo and System.IO.DirectoryInfo objects output.  Get-Date outputs a System.DateTime object.  Get-Process outputs System.Diagnostics.Process objects and Get-Content outputs System.String objects (or arrays of them based on how … Continue reading →

Using Windows PowerShell requires a shift in your mental model for how command line shells deal with information.  In most shells like CSH, Korn shell, BASH, etc you deal primarily with information in text form.  For instance the output of ls or … Continue reading →

I have been a big fan of the Effective series of books over the years from Effective COM to Effective XML.  Without trying to be too presumptuous, I thought I would capture some of the tidbits I’ve picked up over the … Continue reading →