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

Working with providers


Each of the providers shares a common set of commands, such as Set-Location, Get-Item, and New-Item.

Navigating

Set-Location, which has the alias cd, is used to navigate around a provider's hierarchy; for example:

Set-Location \   # The root of the current drive 
Set-Location Windows # A child container named Windows 
Set-Location .. # Navigate up one level 
Set-Location ..\.. # Navigate up two levels 
Set-Location Cert: # Change to a different drive 
Set-Location HKLM:\Software # Change to a specific child container under a drive

Set-Location may only be used to switch to a container object.

The print working directory (pwd) variable shows the current location across all providers:

PS> $pwd

Path 
---- 
HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion

Note

pwd and .NET: .NET classes and methods are oblivious to PowerShell's current directory. When the following command is executed, the file will be created in the Start in path (if a shortcut started PowerShell):[System...