Book Image

Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripting (Second Edition) - Second Edition

By : Brenton J.W. Blawat
Book Image

Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripting (Second Edition) - Second Edition

By: Brenton J.W. Blawat

Overview of this book

PowerShell scripts offer a handy way to automate various chores. Working with these scripts effectively can be a difficult task. This comprehensive guide starts from scratch and covers advanced-level topics to make you a PowerShell expert. The first module, PowerShell Fundamentals, begins with new features, installing PowerShell on Linux, working with parameters and objects, and also how you can work with .NET classes from within PowerShell. In the next module, you’ll see how to efficiently manage large amounts of data and interact with other services using PowerShell. You’ll be able to make the most of PowerShell’s powerful automation feature, where you will have different methods to parse and manipulate data, regular expressions, and WMI. After automation, you will enter the Extending PowerShell module, which covers topics such as asynchronous processing and, creating modules. The final step is to secure your PowerShell, so you will land in the last module, Securing and Debugging PowerShell, which covers PowerShell execution policies, error handling techniques, and testing. By the end of the book, you will be an expert in using the PowerShell language.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 6. Variables, Arrays, and Hashtables

This chapter explores variables along with a detailed look at arrays and hashtables, as these have their own complexities.

A variable in a programming language allows you to assign a label to a piece of information or data. A variable can be used and reused in the console, script, function, or any other piece of code.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following topics:

  • Naming and creating variables
  • Variable commands
  • Variable scope
  • Types and type conversion
  • Objects assigned to variables
  • Arrays
  • Hashtables
  • Lists, dictionaries, queues, and stacks

A variable may be of any .NET type or object instance. The variable may be a string ("Hello World"), an integer (42), a decimal (3.141), an array, a hashtable, a ScriptBlock, and so on. Everything a variable might hold is considered to be an object when used in PowerShell.