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

Naming and creating variables


Variables in PowerShell are preceded by the dollar symbol ($), for example:

$MyVariable

The name of a variable may contain numbers, letters, and underscores. For example, each of the following is a valid name:

$123 
$x 
$my_variable 
$variable 
$varIABle 
$Path_To_File

Variables are frequently written in either camel case or upper-camel case (also known as pascal case). PowerShell does not enforce any naming convention, nor does it exhibit a convention in any of the automatic variables. For example:

  • $myVariable is camel case
  • $MyVariable is upper-camel case or pascal case

I suggest making your variable names meaningful so that when you come and visit your script again after a long break, you can identify its purpose. I recommend choosing and maintaining a consistent style in your own code.

It is possible to use more complex variable names using the following notation:

${My Variable} 
${My-Variable}

The following notation, where a file path is written as the variable name...