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

Hashtables


A hashtable is an associative array or an indexed array. Individual elements in the array are created with a unique key. Keys cannot be duplicated within the hashtable.

Hashtables are important in PowerShell. They are used to create custom objects, to pass parameters into commands, to create custom properties using Select-Object, and as the type for values assigned to parameter values of many different commands, and so on.

Note

For finding commands that use Hashtable as a parameter, we use the following:Get-Command -ParameterType Hashtable

This topic explores creating hashtables, selecting elements, enumerating all values in a hashtable, as well as adding and removing elements.

Creating a hashtable

An empty hashtable is created the same as the following:

$hashtable = @{}

A hashtable with a few objects looks the same as the following:

$hashtable = @{Key1 = "Value1"; Key2 = "Value2"}

Elements in a hashtable may be spread across multiple lines:

$hashtable = @{ 
    Key1 = "Value1" 
    Key2...