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

Chapter 2. Script Structure, Comment Blocks, and Script Logging

The Windows server scanning script requires three core components to make the script suitable for enterprise environments. These components include developing a strict scripting structure, creating the comment block, and developing a flexible logging solution. Strict scripting structures ensure that all your scripts are created in the same order. This means that each section of the code is defined in the same place in all your scripts. A uniform structure helps others understand your code quickly and enables them to follow a standardized format for changes.

You will also learn how to create a comment block at the beginning of the script. The comment block ensures that you fully document the purpose, the requirements, the bug fixes, and change history for the script. It also provides details on how to execute the script leveraging command line parameters.

The final core component discussed in this chapter is logging mechanisms...