The WSL Onion

Calling powershell.exe from PowerShell inside WSL

 Posted on 2022-04-06

The other day I was playing around in WSL with a colleague of mine and we did this: # We start out in WSL Debian and enter PowerShell Core marco@box:~$ pwsh PowerShell 7.2.2 Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. https://aka.ms/powershell Type 'help' to get help. # Then we get the major version of the active PowerShell session PS /home/marco> ($PSVersionTable.PSVersion).Major 7 # Then we call powershell.exe and get a completely different version! PS /home/marco> (powershell. [Read More]
powershell  wsl  debian  windows 

The Null-Coalescing Operator

A closer look at the null-coalescing operator and how it can help us in writing smarter, more concise scripts.

 Posted on 2021-03-22

Today we take a closer look at the null-coalescing operator and how it can help us in writing smarter, more concise scripts. PS> $userDate ?? (Get-Date -Format "yyyy-MM-dd") 2021-02-14 PS> $userDate = Get-Date -Year 2020 -Format "yyyy-MM-dd" PS> $userDate ?? (Get-Date -Format "yyyy-MM-dd") 2020-02-14 How it works We can write some simple code to visualize what the null-coalescing operator is doing function nullCoalescingOperator ($leftValue, $rightValue) { if ($null -eq $leftValue) { return $rightValue } else { return $leftValue } } Usually we will want to assign the resulting value to a variable. [Read More]
powershell  snippets 

Delete Your Old VMware Snapshots

 Posted on 2021-01-01

For the love of Pete, please delete your old snapshots regularly! Old snapshots have caused incidents and even outages more than once in my career and it is really easy to preemptively look for them and get them removed before anything happens. Why To put it plainly, they can cause issues - like 03:00 in the morning pager alert issues and additionally eat up storage space like crazy. Degraded performance of the VM having the snapshot Degraded performance to full outages for other VMs on the same data store due to rapidly increasing snapshot sizes VMware recommends a series of steps to reduce risk when using snapshots: [Read More]
powershell  vmware-powercli  sysadmin 

How To Find With PowerShell

Finding files, do I even need to describe how important this is?

 Posted on 2020-12-31

Finding files, do I even need to describe how important this is? From finding README files in a project $ find . -name README* ./app/README.md ./README.md ./ipsum.md/README.md to locating that one config file you never can remember the location of. $ find . -name dnsconf.yaml ./app/module1/dnsconf.yaml Info All commands in this post are run against a open source repository to allow you to reproduce output & play with the commands. [Read More]
bash-to-powershell  powershell 

Super-Charged Cmdlet Aliases

It works like magic, but it works - Bring your aliasing to a whole other level!

 Posted on 2020-12-02

Backstory I recently wrote a post about PowerShell Aliasing for the folks over at ScriptRunner. The one issue I had while researching for this post was this: You can not create a alias for a function and overwrite one of it’s parameters at the same time while keeping nice features like tab-complete. For a concrete example of this visit please look at the original post. At the end of the post I asked if anyone had a solution to this problem - and the internet delivered! [Read More]
PowerShell  productivity 

Why You Want To Install PowerShell On Windows

Why installing PowerShell on Windows may actually be a good idea

 Posted on 2020-11-28

Q: Wait a minute! Don’t I already have PowerShell? A: Yes. However you may want to continue reading because things are never as simple as they appear. The PowerShell version you have installed on Windows 10 is 5.X, Microsoft even says so in their own documentation. On the initial release of Windows 10, with automatic updates enabled, PowerShell gets updated from version 5.0 to 5.1. If the original version of Windows 10 is not updated through Windows Updates, the version of PowerShell is 5. [Read More]
powershell  windows 

Collections and Randomization

Randomize Collections in PowerShell

 Posted on 2020-11-18

Randomizing a collection is useful in a variety of situations and in most languages it is fairly straight forward. For example Python my_list = range(1,20) random.shuffle(my_list) PHP $numbers = range(1, 20); shuffle($numbers); In PowerShell this works a bit differently. Before 7.1 PS> @(1,2,3) | Sort-Object {Get-Random} 3 1 2 PS> "abc".ToCharArray() | Sort-Object {Get-Random} a c b Well, how does that work? Sort-Object allows us to sort the incoming collection based on a script block. [Read More]
powershell