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.

set-location \\\\servername\sharename

view raw example1.ps hosted with ❤ by GitHub

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.

remove-item c:\temp\**\*.bak

view raw example2.ps hosted with ❤ by GitHub

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

(Get-WmiObject -computer servername Win32_service -Filter "Name='W3SVC'").StartService()

view raw example3.ps hosted with ❤ by GitHub

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

Get-WmiObject -namespace "root/MicrosoftIISV2" -ComputerName "Server" -Credential "yourname" -Authentication PacketPrivacy -Query "SELECT * FROM IIsWebServerSetting" | select { $_.ServerComment, $_.LogFileDirectory }

view raw example4.ps hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Starting VNC Server remotely on OS X

I have a Mac Mini running as a small home server. So small in fact it runs headless, no keyboard, no mouse and no screen. This is fine as I can control it using VNC but every now and then it reboots and the VNC Server doesn't start at boot time.

So this script can be run from and SSH connection to get the server backup and running.

/System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -agent -restart