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

Running the script


The very last step in the script process is invoking the Windows server scanning script. You will need to ensure that you have the answer file in the same directory as the script. You will also want to make sure that you keep a copy of the answer file, because the Windows server scanning script will remove the answer file after execution.

To execute the Windows server scanning script from a command line, you can perform the following:

powershell.exe -executionPolicy bypass -noexit -file"c:\temp\ScanningScript.ps1" "AAZwAmAE4AMgAoAFEAVAAhAFAA" 

The output of this is shown in the following screenshot:

In this example, you successfully launch the Windows server scanning script:

  1. You first start by calling the powershell.exe executable from an elevated command prompt.

  2. You bypass the PowerShell execution policy by leveraging the -executionPolicy parameter with the bypass argument.

  3. You then leverage the -noexit parameter to ensure that the PowerShell session doesn't exit after execution...