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

Selecting and sorting


Select-Object allows a subset of data to be returned when executing a command. This may be a more restrictive number of elements, or a smaller number of properties.

Sort-Object can be used to perform both simple and complex sorting.

The Select-Object command

Select-Object is most frequently used to limit values by a command. The command is extremely versatile as it enables you to do the following:

  • Limit the properties returned by a command by name:
Get-Process | Select-Object -Property Name, Id
  • Limit the properties returned from a command using wildcards:
Get-Process | Select-Object -Property Name, *Memory
  • List everything but a few properties:
Get-Process | Select-Object -Property * -Exclude *Memory*
  • Get the first few objects:
Get-ChildItem C:\ -Recurse | Select-Object -First 2
  • Get the last few objects:
        Get-ChildItem C:\ | Select-Object -Last 3
  • Skip items at the beginning. In this example, this returns the fifth item:
Get-ChildItem C:\ | Select-Object -Skip 4 -First 1
  • Skip...