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

Working with WMI


The scope of WMI is vast, which makes it a fantastic resource for automating processes. WMI classes are not limited to the core operating system; it is not uncommon to find classes created after software or device drivers have been installed.

Given the scope of WMI, finding an appropriate class can be difficult. PowerShell itself is well equipped to explore the available classes.

WMI classes

PowerShell, as a shell for working with objects, presents WMI classes in a very similar manner to .NET classes or any other object. There are a number of parallels between WMI classes and .NET classes.

A WMI class is used as the recipe to create an instance of a WMI object. The WMI class defines properties and methods. The WMI class Win32_Process is used to gather information about running processes in a similar manner to the Get-Process command.

The Win32_Process class has properties such as ProcessId, Name, and CommandLine. It has a terminate method that can be used to kill a process, as...