Book Image

Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripting - Third Edition

By : Chris Dent
Book Image

Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripting - Third Edition

By: Chris Dent

Overview of this book

PowerShell scripts offer a handy way to automate various chores, however working effectively with these scripts can be a difficult task. This comprehensive guide starts with the fundamentals before moving on to advanced-level topics to help you become a PowerShell Core 6.0 expert. The first module, PowerShell Core 6.0 Fundamentals, begins with the new features of PowerShell Core 6.0, installing it on Linux, and working with parameters, objects and .NET classes from within PowerShell Core 6.0. As you make your way through the chapters, you'll see how to efficiently manage large amounts of data and interact with other services using PowerShell Core 6.0. You'll be able to make the most of PowerShell Core 6.0's powerful automation feature, where you will have different methods available to parse data and manipulate regular expressions and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). After having explored automation, you will enter the extending PowerShell Core 6.0 module, covering asynchronous processing and desired state configuration. In the last module, you will learn to extend PowerShell Core 6.0 using advanced scripts and filters, and also debug issues along with working on error handling techniques. By the end of this book, you will be an expert in scripting with PowerShell Core 6.0.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Exploring PowerShell Fundamentals
6
Section 2: Working with Data
16
Section 3: Automating with PowerShell
19
Section 4: Extending PowerShell

Other operators

PowerShell has a wide variety of operators, a few of which do not easily fall into a specific category, including the following:

  • Call: &
  • Comma: ,
  • Format: -f
  • Increment and decrement: ++ and --
  • Join: -join

Each of these operators is in common use. The call operator can run a command based on a string, to the format operator which can be used to build up complex strings, and so on.

Call

The call operator is used to execute a string or script block. For example, the call operator may be used to execute the ipconfig command using a variable:

$command = 'ipconfig' 
& $command 

Or, it may be used to execute a scriptBlock:

$scriptBlock = { Write-Host 'Hello world' } 
& $scriptBlock...