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

Items


Support for each of the *-Item commands varies from one provider to another. The filesystem provider supports all of the commands, while the Registry provider supports a smaller number.

Testing existence

The Test-Path command may be used to test the existence of a specific item under a drive:

Test-Path HKLM:\Software\Publisher

Test-path distinguishes between item types with the PathType parameter. The terms container and leaf are used across providers to broadly classify items.

When working with the filesystem, a container is a directory (or folder) and a leaf is a file. In the registry, a key is a container and there are no leaves. In the certificate provider, a store or store location is a container and a certificate is a leaf.

The following commands test for items of differing types:

Test-Path C:\Windows -PathType Container 
Test-Path C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe -PathType Leaf

The Test-Path command is often used in an if statement prior to creating a file or directory:

if (-not (Test-Path...