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

Implementating regular expression performance


Regular expressions are very versatile when implemented in PowerShell scripts. Not only are they used for pattern validation, they are much faster at analyzing large sets of data. When you compare regular expressions and foreach array loops side-by-side, the former will consistently outperform the latter.

Note

Part 1 and Part 2 require that a PowerShell Window is Run as administrator. When testing this code, you will want to right-click the PowerShell icon and select Run as administrator. If you are remotely executing this code, you will want to ensure that the user credentials you are using have administrative rights to the system.

The total number of files in the $files array may be slightly different than what's displayed in this example.

Part 1—To create a large dataset of filenames in c:\Window\System32, you can perform the following:

$files = (Get-ChildItem c:\Windows\System32 -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue).Name
1..8 | % { $files ...