Book Image

Enterprise PowerShell Scripting Bootcamp

By : Brenton J.W. Blawat
Book Image

Enterprise PowerShell Scripting Bootcamp

By: Brenton J.W. Blawat

Overview of this book

Enterprise PowerShell Scripting Bootcamp explains how to create your own repeatable PowerShell scripting framework. This framework contains script logging methodologies, answer file interactions, and string encryption and decryption strategies. This book focuses on evaluating individual components to identify the system’s function, role, and unique characteristics. To do this, you will leverage built-in CMDlets and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to explore Windows services, Windows processes, Windows features, scheduled tasks, and disk statistics. You will also create custom functions to perform a deep search for specific strings in files and evaluate installed software through executable properties. We will then discuss different scripting techniques to improve the efficiency of scripts. By leveraging several small changes to your code, you can increase the execution performance by over 130%. By the end of this book, you will be able to tie all of the concepts together in a PowerShell-based Windows server scanning script. This discovery script will be able to scan a Windows server to identify a multitude of components.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Enterprise PowerShell Scripting Bootcamp
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
3
Working with Answer Files
Index

PowerShell script 3 - the termination files


There may come a time where you will need to terminate the execution of the Windows server scanning script. This could be due to the script consuming too many resources, or the script taking too long to execute. One of the most efficient ways to quickly and gracefully terminate a script is leveraging a termination file. When a termination file is placed on the system, the script will stop its current action, and gracefully exit the script.

The two methods to deploy the termination file in an environment are either locally on the server, or by leveraging remote commands. When you leverage deployment tools, you may have to create a script that runs locally on the system. If you want to create the termination file locally on a system, you can leverage the new-item cmdlet with the -path parameter set to "c:\temp\KILL_SERVER_SCAN.NOW". You then specify the -ItemType parameter with the argument of File. After execution, the termination file will be created...