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

Lists, dictionaries, queues, and stacks


Arrays and hashtables are integral to PowerShell and being able to manipulate these is critical. If these simpler structures fail to provide an efficient means to work with a set of data, there are advanced alternatives.

The following .NET collections will be discussed:

  • System.Collections.Generic.List
  • System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary
  • System.Collections.Generic.Queue
  • System.Collections.Generic.Stack

Each of these collections has detailed documentation (for .NET) on MSDN:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.collections.generic(v=vs.110).aspx

Lists

A lists is the same as an array but with a larger set of features, such as the ability to add elements without copying two arrays into a new one. The generic list, using the .NET class, System.Collections.Generic.List, is shown next.

The ArrayList is often used in examples requiring advanced array manipulation in PowerShell. However, ArrayList is older (.NET 2.0), less efficient (it can use more memory...