In late 2002, Slashdot posted a story about a “next-generation shell” rumored to be in development at Microsoft. As a longtime fan of the power unlocked by shells and their scripting languages, the post immediately captured my interest. Could this shell provide the command-line power and productivity I’d long loved on Unix systems?
Since I had just joined Microsoft six months earlier, I jumped at the chance to finally get to the bottom of a Slashdot-sourced Microsoft Mystery. The post talked about strong integration with the .NET Framework, so I posted a query to an internal C# mailing list. I got a response that the project was called “Monad,” which I then used to track down an internal prototype build.
Prototype was a generous term. In its early stages, the build was primarily a proof of concept. Want to clear the screen? No problem! Just lean on the Enter key until your previous commands and output scroll out of view! But even at these early stages, it was immediately clear that Monad marked a revolution in command-line shells. As with many things of this magnitude, its beauty was self-evident. Monad passed full-fidelity .NET objects between its commands. For even the most complex commands, Monad abolished the (until now, standard) need for fragile text-based parsing. Simple and powerful data manipulation tools supported this new model, creating a shell both powerful and easy to use.
I joined the Monad development team shortly after that to help do my part to bring this masterpiece of technology to the rest of the world. Since then, Monad has grown to become a real, tangible product—now called Windows PowerShell.
So why write a book about it? And why this book?
Many users have picked up PowerShell for the sake of learning PowerShell. Any tangible benefits come by way of side effect. Others, though, might prefer to opportunistically learn a new technology as it solves their needs. How do you use PowerShell to navigate the filesystem? How can you manage files and folders? Retrieve a web page?
This book focuses squarely on helping you learn PowerShell through task-based solutions to your most pressing problems. Read a recipe, read a chapter, or read the entire book—regardless, you’re bound to learn something.
This book helps you use PowerShell to get things done. It contains hundreds of solutions to specific, real-world problems. For systems management, you’ll find plenty of examples that show how to manage the filesystem, the Windows Registry, event logs, processes, and more. For enterprise administration, you’ll find two entire chapters devoted to WMI, Active Directory, and other enterprise-focused tasks.
Along the way, you’ll also learn an enormous amount about PowerShell: its features, its commands, and its scripting language—but most importantly you’ll solve problems.
This book consists of five main sections: a guided tour of PowerShell, PowerShell fundamentals, common tasks, administrator tasks, and a detailed reference.
A Guided Tour of Windows PowerShell breezes through PowerShell at a high level. It introduces PowerShell’s core features:
The tour helps you become familiar with PowerShell as a whole. This familiarity will create a mental framework for you to understand the solutions from the rest of the book.
Chapters 1 through 8 cover the fundamentals that underpin the solutions in this book. This section introduces you to the PowerShell interactive shell, fundamental pipeline and object concepts, and many features of the PowerShell scripting language.
Chapters 9 through 19 cover the tasks you will run into most commonly when starting to tackle more complex problems in PowerShell. This includes working with simple and structured files, Internet-connected scripts, code reuse, user interaction, and more.
Chapters 20 through 32 focus on the most common tasks in systems and enterprise management. Chapters 20 through 25 focus on individual systems: the filesystem, the registry, event logs, processes, services, and more. Chapters 26 and 27 focus on Active Directory, as well as the typical tasks most common in managing networked or domain-joined systems. Chapters 28 through 30 focus on the three crucial facets of robust multi-machine management: WMI, PowerShell Remoting, and PowerShell Workflows.
Many books belch useless information into their appendixes simply to increase page count. In this book, however, the detailed references underpin an integral and essential resource for learning and using PowerShell. The appendixes cover:
The majority of this book requires only a working installation of Windows PowerShell. Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows Server 2012 include Windows PowerShell by default. If you do not yet have PowerShell installed, you may obtain it by following the download link here. This link provides download instructions for PowerShell on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista. For Windows Server 2008, PowerShell comes installed as an optional component that you can enable through the Control Panel like other optional components.
The Active Directory scripts given in Chapter 26 are most useful when applied to an enterprise environment, but Test Active Directory Scripts on a Local Installation shows how to install additional software (Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services, or Active Directory Application Mode) that lets you run these scripts against a local installation.
The following typographical conventions are used in this book:
- Plain text
Indicates menu titles, menu options, menu buttons, and keyboard accelerators
- Italic
Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, directories, and Unix utilities
Constant widthIndicates commands, options, switches, variables, attributes, keys, functions, types, classes, namespaces, methods, modules, properties, parameters, values, objects, events, event handlers, tags, macros, or the output from commands
Constant width boldShows commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user
Constant width italicShows text that should be replaced with user-supplied values
To obtain electronic versions of the programs and examples given in this book, visit the Examples link here.
This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, you may use the code in this book in your programs and documentation. You do not need to contact us for permission unless you’re reproducing a significant portion of the code. For example, writing a program that uses several chunks of code from this book does not require permission. Selling or distributing a CD-ROM of examples from O’Reilly books does require permission. Answering a question by citing this book and quoting example code does not require permission. Incorporating a significant amount of example code from this book into your product’s documentation does require permission.
We appreciate, but do not require, attribution. An attribution usually includes the title, author, publisher, and ISBN. For example: “Windows PowerShell Cookbook, Third Edition, by Lee Holmes (O’Reilly). Copyright 2013 Lee Holmes, 978-1-449-32068-3.”
If you feel your use of code examples falls outside fair use or the permission given, feel free to contact us at permissions@oreilly.com.
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Writing is the task of crafting icebergs. The heft of the book you hold in your hands is just a hint of the multiyear, multirelease effort it took to get it there. And by a cast much larger than me.
The groundwork started decades ago. My parents nurtured my interest in computers and software, supported an evening-only bulletin board service, put up with “viruses” that told them to buy a new computer for Christmas, and even listened to me blather about batch files or how PowerShell compares to Excel. Without their support, who knows where I’d be.
My family and friends have helped keep me sane for two editions of the book now. Ariel: you are the light of my life. Robin: thinking of you reminds me each day that serendipity is still alive and well in this busy world. Thank you to all of my friends and family for being there for me. You can have me back now. :)
I would not have written either edition of this book without the tremendous influence of Guy Allen, visionary of the University of Toronto’s Professional Writing program. Guy: your mentoring forever changed me, just as it molds thousands of others from English hackers into writers.
Of course, members of the PowerShell team (both new and old) are the ones that made this a book about PowerShell. Building this product with you has been a unique challenge and experience—but most of all, a distinct pleasure. In addition to the PowerShell team, the entire PowerShell community defined this book’s focus. From MVPs to early adopters to newsgroup lurkers: your support, questions, and feedback have been the inspiration behind each page.
Converting thoughts into print always involves a cast of unsung heroes, even though each author tries his best to convince the world how important these heroes are.
Thank you to the many technical reviewers who participated in O’Reilly’s Open Feedback Publishing System, especially Aleksandar Nikolic and Shay Levy. I truly appreciate you donating your nights and weekends to help craft something of which we can all be proud.
To the awesome staff at O’Reilly—Rachel Roumeliotis, Kara Ebrahim, Mike Hendrickson, Genevieve d’Entremont, Teresa Elsey, Laurel Ruma, the O’Reilly Tools Monks, and the production team—your patience and persistence helped craft a book that holds true to its original vision. You also ensured that the book didn’t just knock around in my head but actually got out the door.
This book would not have been possible without the support from each and every one of you.
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