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

Overall script structure


When you are creating scripts, you should adhere to a strict script structure. The structure of the script dictates the order of execution and how things are processed. The following diagram displays the proper method for organizing your script:

It is recommended that you structure your scripts as follows:

  1. Declare the comment block: To start the scripting process, declare a comment block and include everything that is pertinent to the script. This may include a description, revision information, author, editor, and additional notes.

  2. Declare the input parameters: After the header, declare your input parameters, if required by the script. The input parameters are required to be directly after the comment block. Input parameters help the developers identify what is being inputted into the script, and what fields are required for proper execution of the script.

  3. Declare the global variables: You should declare your global variables after the input parameters. Since variables...