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

Objects assigned to variables


So far, we have explored one-off assignments of simple value types, and while these values are considered objects, they are still (reasonably) simple objects. Once created, variables holding simple values such as integers and strings can diverge without affecting one another.

That is, the numeric value assigned to each variable is independent after creation:

$i = $j = 5

Each of the following commands increases the value held in the variable i by creating a new integer object (based on the original object):

$i = $j = 5 
$i++ 
$i += 1 
$i = $i + 1

If each statement is executed in turn, the variable i will be 8 and the variable j will be 5.

When changing the value of a property on a more complex object, the change will be reflected in any variable referencing that object. Consider this example where we create a custom object and assign it to two variables:

$object1 = $object2 = [PSCustomObject]@{ 
    Name = 'First object'
 }

A change to a property on an object will be...