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

Excluding long paths


With enterprise file servers, you may run into situations where the folder structures and file character count are over 248 characters. Windows, by default, restricts the use of long file paths to 248 characters in length. It is not uncommon to have Linux-based file servers, or mapped network drives with long file paths that go over the 248-character limit.

PowerShell has the same file path limitations as the Windows operating systems. All of the PowerShell cmdlets will have issues querying file systems that have folder paths longer than 248 characters. There are several programs such as robocopy.exe that can be leveraged to display the full paths of files and folders longer than 248 characters. While you have the ability to return long paths, you still would not be able to interact with any of the files in that directory using PowerShell cmdlets. Additionally, robocopy.exe is very slow in comparison to the Get-ChildItem cmdlet, and requires administrative backup privileges...