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

Parameters and parameter sets


As seen while looking at syntax in Get-Help, commands accept a mixture of parameters.

Parameters

When viewing help for a command, we can see many different approaches to different parameters.

Optional parameters

Optional parameters are surrounded by square brackets. This denotes an optional parameter that requires a value (when used):

SYNTAX
    Get-Process [-ComputerName <String[]>] ...

In this case, if a value for a parameter is to be specified, the name of the parameter must also be specified, as shown in the following example:

Get-Process -ComputerName somecomputer

Optional positional parameters

It is not uncommon to see an optional positional parameter as the first parameter:

SYNTAX
    Get-Process [[-Name] <String[]>] ...

In this example, we may use either of the following:

Get-Process -Name powershell 
Get-Process powershell

Mandatory parameters

A mandatory parameter must always be supplied and is written as follows:

SYNTAX
    Get-ADUser -Filter <string...