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

Comment blocks


The first recommendation is to create comment blocks for detailed tracking information about the PowerShell script itself. Comment blocks can track information about the script's creation, authors, changes, and other useful information that will enable you to quickly determine what the script is doing. PowerShell has built-in comment block support which integrates with the get-help cmdlet.

The required components include the following:

  1. Comment block location: The comment block must be the first item defined at the top of your script. If you use parameter blocks, you specify the parameter blocks after the comment block.

  2. Start comment block: In order to integrate with the help system, you need to specify the starting of the comment block. To start a comment block, you type <#.

  3. .SYNOPSIS: To create a synopsis for the script, type .SYNOPSIS on a line, and then on a subsequent line type a one-line description of why the script is being created.

  4. .DESCRIPTION: To create a full...