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

Summary


In this chapter, you learned how to get Windows features with the get-windowsFeature cmdlet. You then learned how to use the win32_serverfeature to retrieve Windows features on legacy systems. You also leveraged an XML file to correlate feature, role, and parent IDs from the win32_serverfeature class to user-friendly names. You proceeded to evaluate why win32_product should not be used in scripts. You then leveraged the registry to discover installed software. Finally, you learned how to scan the Program Files and Program Files (x86) directories for executables and extended properties for software identification.

In the next chapter, you will learn a method for scanning a folder structure for files that contain specific strings.