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

Type and type conversion


Type conversion in PowerShell is used to switch between different types of a value. Types are written between square brackets, in which the type name must be a .NET type, or a class, or an enumeration, such as a string, an integer (Int32), a date (DateTime), and so on.

For example, a date may be changed to a string:

PS> [String](Get-Date)
10/27/2016 13:14:32

Or a string may be changed into a date:

PS> [DateTime]"01/01/2016"

01 January 2016 00:00:00

In a similar manner, variables may be given a fixed type. To assign a type to a variable, the following notation is used:

[String]$thisString = "some value" 
[Int]$thisNumber = 2 
[DateTime]$date = '01/01/2016' 

This adds an argument type converter attribute to the variable. The presence of this converter is visible using Get-Variable, although the resultant type is not:

PS> [String]$thisString = "some value"
(Get-Variable thisString).Attributes 

TransformNullOptionalParameters TypeId 
-----------------------------...