Category Archives: Powershell Basics

The Get-Date  -UFormat parameter formats the date using Unix format.  The full list of format specifiers are in the Notes section of the Get-Date help file. Some examples are: PS> Get-Date -UFormat ‘%Y-%m-%d %H:%M%:%S%Z’ 2019-05-27 20:40:11+01 4 digit year – … Continue reading →

Get-Date –Format enables you to control the formatting of the datetime object returned by the cmdlet. A standard call to get date returns: PS> Get-Date 27 May 2019 12:36:47 The –Format parameter takes a value from the DateTimeFormatInfo class – … Continue reading →

PowerShell has a number of logical operators – –  -and, –or, –not (or !). One I’ve really thought about is the exclusive OR operator –xor. With a standard –or operator the result is TRUE if one of the statements is … Continue reading →

PowerShell provides easy access to some useful constants. I often see people calculating these values rather than using the constants. PowerShell recognises kb, mb, gb, tb and pb for kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte and petabyte respectively. You can use them … Continue reading →

PowerShell has a number of looping mechanisms – do-while; do-until; foreach; while and for loops. In this post I’ll show you how to use the PowerShell for loop. A for loop iterates a predefined  number 0f times. A basic for … Continue reading →

There are a number of file extensions associated with PowerShell. If you’re not aware of them they may cause you problems. You’ll commonly find these PowerShell file extensions: .ps1 – a PowerShell script. May contain functionality such as functions or … Continue reading →

PowerShell pause – how can you pause a PowerShell script? Two ways come to mind. First if you just want the script to pause for a specified time period then you can use Start-Sleep 1..10 | foreach {   $PSItem   if … Continue reading →

Loops are a construction seen in most scripting and programming languages. A loop is used to repeat a set of statements a set number of times or until a specific criterion is met or while a specific criterion is true. … Continue reading →

PowerShell enables you to work with the file system on your machine – one question that often comes up is how to create a directory. When working interactively you can use md PS> md c:\testf1      Directory: C:\ Mode                LastWriteTime         … Continue reading →

PowerShell has a number of ways to perform a loop – I recently counted seven distinct methods. If you can’t list them all don’t worry one is very esoteric and unexpected. I’ll enumerate them in a future post. For now … Continue reading →