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GroupPolicy Module When you create a new Group Policy, you can set a comment (or description). There is no apparent way, however, to change the...

All PowerShell versions With Get-Acl, you can output the security information from files and folders as plain text in SDDL format (Security...

All PowerShell Versions Here is a clever trick how to find out how many lines a string (not a string array!) contains: $text = @' This is some...

All PowerShell Versions To find the smallest and largest item in a range of numbers, use Measure-Object: $list = 1,4,3,1,3,12,990 $result = $list |...

All PowerShell versions When you use Get-ChildItem to get a list of files, you may have noticed that the -Filter parameter occasionally returns more...

Test-Path can test whether or not a given file or folder exists. This works fine for paths that use a drive letter, but can fail with pure UNC...

Credential objects contain a username and a password. You can create them using Get-Credential, and then supply this object to any cmdlet that has...

Beginning in PowerShell 3.0, there is a new automatic variable available called $PSScriptRoot. This variable previously was only available within...

By default, Active Directory returns only the first 1000 search results when you use an ADSISearcher. This is a security mechanism designed to...

Converting SID from Binary to String Active Directory accounts contain the SID in binary form. To convert the byte array into a string...

When you export Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to CSV files, Excel by default saves CSV files in ANSI encoding. That's bad because special characters...

If you have a CSV file and would like to change the order of columns, simply import it into PowerShell, use Select-Object to change the order, and...

In a previous tip we explained how you can use slmgr, a built-in VBScript, to check Windows licensing state. Accessing the Raw Licensing Data in...

Extracting the Integer Part of a Division Result When you divide numbers and just want the decimals before the decimal point, you could cast the...

Removing multiple white spaces from text is easy in PowerShell. -replace operator Simply use -replace operator and look for whitespaces ("\s") that...

Send Emails with PowerShell Using Send-MailMessage PowerShell has built-in support for sending emails: Send-MailMessage! All you need is an SMTP...

Reading Text Files and Skipping Blank Lines To read in a text file and skip blank lines, try this: $file = 'c:\sometextfile.txt' Get-Content $file |...

Set the default value for a registry key If you need to set the default value for a registry key, you can use either of these approaches:...

Scraping Website Data with PowerShell To scrape valuable information from websites with PowerShell you can download the HTML code and then use...

PowerShell hash tables PowerShell hash tables are, by default, not case sensitive: PS > $hash = @{} PS > $hash.Key = 1 PS > $hash.keY = 2...

Dealing with 32-bit Dependencies in a 64-bit Environment If you are using code that can only run in a 32-bit environment (i.e. using old database...

When working remotely in a peer-to-peer or cross-domain scenario, you will have to add all the computers you'd like to communicate with into the...

Identifying a Process by Window Title It isn't always easy to pick the right process because the process ID or process name may not be known or...

Understanding the Limitation of Hash Tables Compared to Switch Statements In the previous tip, you used a hash table to translate input values....

Did you notice that Dir, ls or Get-ChildItem do not return hidden files? Use the -Force Parameter to Reveal Hidden Files To see hidden files, you...

Sometimes, you may have an existing VBScript that already does just what you want. You can easily incorporate any VBScript into PowerShell because...

In a previous tip, you learned how to call PowerShell statements and read their return value. Return values are somewhat limited because they can...

Why Hide PowerShell Script Code? Sometimes, you may want to hide the code of your PowerShell script in order to protect passwords contained within...