Tuesday, May 19, 2009

3 reasons for using PowerShell

I wish to learn PowerShell as Windows finally has a great shell making it possibile to automate tasks that are long winded using the GUI.

Here are three very simple task which were hard to achieve using the MS-DOS shell.

Connect to UNC paths

To browse a network share in cmd.exe you first had to map a drive. With PowerShell you can navigate to server shares as you would a local drive.

Easy to recurse folders and files

While it is possible to recursively delete files in cmd.exe, PowerShell has built in support for the ** operator making operations on sets of files very simple. For an example, the following will delete all files with the extension .bak from the C:\temp and all folders within it.

Controlling remote servers

Often I have to administer a service on a remote machine, a recent example is starting the W3SVC on a server which kept failing. As PowerShell has access to the Windows Management Interface API I can run this command instead of using IIS manager over Remote Desktop


In fact PowerShell finally provides a useful wrapper around those rich but hard to get at WMI APIs. The following script will enumerate all websites and display the path to their log file

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