Book Image

Enterprise PowerShell Scripting Bootcamp

By : Brenton J.W. Blawat
Book Image

Enterprise PowerShell Scripting Bootcamp

By: Brenton J.W. Blawat

Overview of this book

Enterprise PowerShell Scripting Bootcamp explains how to create your own repeatable PowerShell scripting framework. This framework contains script logging methodologies, answer file interactions, and string encryption and decryption strategies. This book focuses on evaluating individual components to identify the system’s function, role, and unique characteristics. To do this, you will leverage built-in CMDlets and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to explore Windows services, Windows processes, Windows features, scheduled tasks, and disk statistics. You will also create custom functions to perform a deep search for specific strings in files and evaluate installed software through executable properties. We will then discuss different scripting techniques to improve the efficiency of scripts. By leveraging several small changes to your code, you can increase the execution performance by over 130%. By the end of this book, you will be able to tie all of the concepts together in a PowerShell-based Windows server scanning script. This discovery script will be able to scan a Windows server to identify a multitude of components.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Enterprise PowerShell Scripting Bootcamp
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
3
Working with Answer Files
Index

Using regular expressions


One of the best ways to increase your script performance is by leveraging regular expressions. Regular expressions provide robust pattern matching to provide quick evaluation of large amounts of data. The two common methods for using regular expressions are comparison operators and cmdlets that support the use of regular expressions. The -match comparison operator, for example, allows you to match a string or an array to an expression. If the pattern matches, the regular expression evaluates the statement to be true, that is, a match was found.

You may also use cmdlets such as the select-string cmdlet, which natively supports regular expression patterns. While the select-string cmdlet provides the -SimpleMatch parameter for simplicity of searching, you can also use the same cmdlet to match regular expression patterns. This adds to the versatility of pre-existing cmdlets, as they can now support regular expressions to search for patterns in addition to strings.

The...