What are your favorite Powershell Cmdlets? [closed]
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08-06-2019 - |
Question
I just found /n softwares free Powershell NetCmdlets, and after playing with them I love the functionality they bring to the command line. So it raises the question what are your favorite Cmdlets, and how do you use them?
Solution
As a programmer/hacker, Get-Member
and Get-Command
are the ones I use more than any others, but the ones I use to show off are Select-Control
and Send-Keys
from WASP, the PowerGadgets, and some of my own stuff written in WPF against CTP2 or PoshConsole ;-)
OTHER TIPS
there's an out-twitter script i use for posting to twitter. it's nice, as it means you can send something to twitter without the risk of being distracted by a browser.
i added an alias for it, "twit".
so now you can type, for example:
PS C:\>"trying out stack overflow" | twit
and if successfully lodged, it will return an integer that identifies your post.
Get-Member, hands down. No, it's not very glamorous, but the ability to inspect objects interactively beats interrupting your work to go hit up MSDN.
Set-Clipboard, found on the PowerShell Community Extensions project on CodePlex. Usually when I'm working in PowerShell, the ultimate goal is to generate some text or even an Excel spreadsheet. Set-Clipboard eliminates all of the intermediate "save it to a file, ok now open that file, select all, copy to clipboard" steps--you do it all in PowerShell.
While it is not as fun as Out-Twitter, my favorite cmdlet is Get-Member, since it allows me to examine any of the objects I'm working with and find out new properties and methods, as well as the underlying type of the object.
If I did not choose Get-Member, I would have to go with Out-Clipboard from the PowerShell Community Extensions (PSCX), as it enables a whole lot of clipboard automation and makes using PowerShell for code templating much easier.
I wrote a PowerShell provider to give me access to IE7's RSS feed store, and had lots of fun with it.
It lets me cd
to a drive called feed:
and navigate around folders and feeds using cd
and dir
.
It even lets you add or remove feeds from the command line.
See this post on my blog as an example:
Getting the Most Prolific Authors in your Feeds
It's rolled up into the PowerShell Community Extensions project nowadays, which you can find on CodePlex here.
Well it is a little bland, but I would vote for Get-Help.
export-csv. This creates a nice report in a manager-friendly Excel-ready format. Bonus points if you have community extensions installed and user send-smtpmail.
Management report in their inbox from the commandline. Nice.
While semi-related to your question, it does not entirely fit the Powershell NetCmdlets motif. But I wanted to post it anyhow as I use it daily and it may help others. Simply making shift-control-c key combo into displaying the visual studio command prompt.
ls (Get-ChildItem) rm (Remove-Item) ps (Get-Process)
and the rest of my familiar commands that now "just work" :)
but seriously... New-Object would have to get my vote. With it, powershell can do ANYTHING :)
I find Get-member to be the most useful native PowerShell cmdlet. I also use Get-WMIObject on a daily basis. Even if I'm troubleshooting a VBScript problem for someone I'll turn to Get-WMIObject because I can work with WMI interactively.
The combination of Get-WMIObject and Get-Member is something I use throughout the workday. Working on Get-Sandwich.
I do alot of work with Microsoft Lync 2010 which includes a set of synthetic for testing functionality. Of these Test-CsPstnOutboundCall is my favourite.
For general scripting got to vote for get-member and get-help :)