PowerShell is Powerful

[Ian]

I hadn't quite appreciated how good Windows PowerShell is... it is amazingly good. When I heard that the command prompt was going to be replaced by it, I was a little sad (nostalgia!), but I've had a good play with PowerShell over the past few days and I've scripted a huge number of things that would never had been possible with Batch files.

For example, I can now patch the forum software with a few clicks thanks to a PowerShell script. It will download the patch, unzip it, ask for credentials, FTP it to the server, log in to the web-interface and process the upgrade. This used to take me a while to do manually, but it's under 10 seconds now that it's automated .

PowerShell makes it easy to open up a "select file" dialog box and assign it to a variable, or to parse a CSV/XML file. A huge number of functions are built in.

If you use batch scripting, please do take a look at PowerShell in a bit more detail, as it's a lot better than I expected.

 

[EvanDavis]

Interesting. The only thing I have used PowerShell for was to get rid of the crap that came with Windows 10.

 

[Ian]

Haha, well that's one way of putting it to good use .

I'm going through a lot of my old batch scripts and converting them to PowerShell, I'm really pleased with some of the new built-in functionality.

 

[V_R]

Interesting. The only thing I have used PowerShell for was to get rid of the crap that came with Windows 10.

Same here!

I'd love to use it for more productive stuff, but I don't know the first thing about it....

 

[Ian]

What sort of things do you think you might use it for, and I'll see if I can find some good examples . I'm so pleased with how easy it is to use that I'm keen to help the uptake. When I first saw it, I was daunted, as it looks so different to what I was used to - but it's a really nice scripting language to pick up once you get your head around it.

 

[V_R]

What sort of things do you think you might use it for

No idea! What sort of things is it good for?

 

[Ian]

I use it for server backups, creating a log of file modification attempts (a server security tripwire), etc..

It is so much more powerful than batch scripting, it has built in functions to do text-to-speech, grab/check URLs, hash files (for comparison). For example, you could even make a script that would read out any new alerts that appear on PCR (not really useful, but an example of the level of things that PowerShell can do).