SQL Server 2014 with PowerShell v5 Cookbook

Chapter 11. Helpful PowerShell Snippets

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Documenting the PowerShell script for Get-Help
• Getting history
• Getting a timestamp
• Getting more error messages
• Listing processes
• Getting aliases
• Exporting to CSV and XML
• Using Invoke-Expression
• Testing regular expressions
• Managing folders
• Manipulating files
• Compressing files
• Searching for files
• Reading an event log
• Sending an e-mail
• Embedding C# Code
• Creating an HTML report
• Parsing XML
• Extracting data from a web service
• Using PowerShell remoting

Introduction

In this chapter, we tackle a variety of recipes that are not SQL Server-specific; but you may find them useful as you use PowerShell with SQL Server. Often, you will need to compress (or zip) files, create timestamped files, ...