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

Performing script cleanup


Once you are done executing a PowerShell script on a system, you will need to evaluate the data footprint that you are leaving on the system. If you are creating files, you will want to make sure that they don't contain sensitive data. If you are leveraging answer files, you will want to make sure that they're removed from the system.

Some of the common script cleanup activities include:

  • Delete answer files: Since answer files typically contain sensitive information, you will want to verify that the files have been deleted at the end of your script.

  • Delete supporting files: Any files that are used for installation of software should be removed from the system.

  • Delete sensitive files: If you are performing data collection for sensitive information, you will want to make sure that you delete the files from the system. In some cases, you may want to encrypt the data as its being written to ensure a secure data gathering experience.

  • Ensure all script-created processes...