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

Web requests


A background in web requests is valuable before delving into interfaces that run over the top of Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

PowerShell can use Invoke-WebRequest to send HTTP requests. For example, the following command will return the response to a GET request for the Hey, Scripting Guy blog:

Invoke-WebRequest -UseBasicParsing https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/heyscriptingguy/

HTTP methods

HTTP supports a number of different methods, including:

  • GET
  • HEAD
  • POST
  • PUT
  • DELETE
  • CONNECT
  • OPTIONS
  • TRACE
  • PATCH

These methods are defined in the HTTP 1.1 specification:

https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html

It is common to find that a web server only supports a subset of these. In many cases, supporting too many methods is deemed to be a security risk. The Invoke-WebRequest command can be used to verify the list of HTTP methods supported by a site, for example:

PS> Invoke-WebRequest www.indented.co.uk -Method OPTIONS | 
    Select-Object -ExpandProperty Headers 
 
Key         ...