I found a powershell tip regarding $profile.psextended that returns all of the various Powershell profiles and their locations. Having never see that before I ran ($profile | get-member). psextended was not in the list of results.
Having access to some very helpful MVPs on another site I asked how the psextended property was found. Within minutes I got a reply that using ($profile | gm -View all) should do the trick. I tried this and still had no results matching what I was looking for. If you enter $profile. and keep hitting the tab button it scrolls through the possible matches. psextended is nowhere to be found. Am I losing my mind or just plain blind?
Any help would be appreciated as I do not want to frustrate or annoy the guy trying to help me.
Thanks.
--
Eric
Every object, once assigned to a variable, is wrapped in a special semi-transparent object called a PSObject. This is powershell's way of trying to level the playing field for the different types of things that be assigned to a variable. There are four "special" properties exposing different things for any given variable in powershell:
ps> $o = 1
ps> $o.psobject
...
ps> $o.psadapted
...
ps> $o.psextended
...
ps> $o.psbase
...
You can read about these properties over on:
Link
Sorry. This was answered by Shay Levy (http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/ScriptFanatic/) on another service. Posted here to close the topic.
$profile | get-member -Force
lists the result I was looking for and several more for me to check out.
Related
I've been making this program where i need to send a command to powershell and in return it gives me the sys UpTime (minutes work better but not mandatory)
As i'm still not used to using powershell, i'm having a lot of problems in getting this intel.
This is what i tryed:
(get-date) - (gcim Win32_OperatingSystem).LastBootUpTime
Gives me the uptime, but i still have no idea how to work with that, so i still need to somehow add something like:
| Select-String -Pattern "TotalMinutes"
But then i need (somehow) to make that powershell gives me that time as return so i can work with it.
maybe to clipboard?
| clip
But if i add all those up, none will work.
Putting in the clipboard is just a way i made to get this info, others might also work.
I'm still very new to this, sorry if i hurt your intellect with stupid questions.
Thanks in advance
By subtracting two [datetime] (System.DateTime) instances, you get a [timespan] (System.TimeSpan) instance, which you can store in a variable:
$timeSpanSinceBoot = (Get-Date) - (Get-CimInstance Win32_OperatingSystem).LastBootUpTime
You can then access its properties as needed, such as .TotalMinutes:
$timeSpanSinceBoot.TotalMinutes
To examine the members of the time-span value's type, use the Get-Member cmdlet:
$timeSpanSinceBoot | Get-Member # lists properties and methods
What is the purpose of this string? I am still new to PowerShell and have seen this come up quiet a bit.
$_.Class
Here is an example of how I have seen it used:
$R.AllElements|?{$_.Class -eq "table"}|select innerText
Does this meant that we are applying a class on the $R variable? Or is there a "Class" already for that variable that we are searching for the string "table"? I have looked around but cannot find any explanation.
Here's an example for you to understand the purpose of $_.xxxxx
$Obj = Get-Item -Path 'C:\Program Files'
This would put any information gathered by the Get-Item command and store it in $Obj. If you then show what's in the variable, it will look something like this
If you would then do $obj.xxx where xxx is one of the property names shown above, it will show you the values under that property like this
Another way to get the values of said properties is how you have shown in your post. If you pipe the variable into a where statement like below, it is especially helpful when trying to filter out some text inside a particular variable. This example is looking for the text prog in the Name property of all the items inside of $Obj2
I wish I had time to give more details, I hope this helps you some! PowerShell is one of the best tools for Automation and Administration in a Windows environment so keep on learnin!
Bonus: Here is a link to documentation on PowerShell's pipelines and how it works, I referred to it as 'pipe' in my wordage above
I have a bunch of .lnk files and need to treat them differently depending on the target that the shortcut points to. I've found very little of how to this with other languages, but nothing about doing this with powershell.
I've tried this:
$sh = New-Object -COM WScript.Shell
$target = $sh.CreateShortcut('<path>').Target
But this returns an empty string even though I can see in the .lnk properties that the Target is specified.
Any idea on how to accomplish this?
You have made an error in the property; as wOxxOm suggests, you should be using TargetPath rather than Target:
$sh = New-Object -ComObject WScript.Shell
$target = $sh.CreateShortcut('<full-path-to-shortcut>').TargetPath
Google and MSDN were indeed helpful here; additionally, piping objects to Get-Member can often be useful and educational. This question also shows how to manipulate shortcuts using PowerShell, and uses the same technique as seen here.
If you want the arguments to the executable as well, those are stored separately:
$arguments = $sh.CreateShortcut('<full-path-to-shortcut>').Arguments
Again, piping objects to Get-Member - in this case, the object returned by WScript.Shell.CreateShortcut() - provides useful information.
It should be noted that there are issues with using this technique and these calls when the path contains Unicode emoji characters; there is a workaround for this case in this StackOverflow question.
It may seem obvious to experts but to us simpletons there seems to be a key lightbulb moment here:
<full-path-to-shortcut> = the Full Name! Doh!
Make sure you use .FullName if you use Get_ChildItem | ForEach-Object, etc. with the Shell .CreateShortcut call if you want the current target of a shortcut. For me:
.CreateShortcut($_.FullName) returned an appropriate value; whereas
.CreateShortcut($_) returned 'null'
I have a bunch of .lnk files and need to treat them differently depending on the target that the shortcut points to. I've found very little of how to this with other languages, but nothing about doing this with powershell.
I've tried this:
$sh = New-Object -COM WScript.Shell
$target = $sh.CreateShortcut('<path>').Target
But this returns an empty string even though I can see in the .lnk properties that the Target is specified.
Any idea on how to accomplish this?
You have made an error in the property; as wOxxOm suggests, you should be using TargetPath rather than Target:
$sh = New-Object -ComObject WScript.Shell
$target = $sh.CreateShortcut('<full-path-to-shortcut>').TargetPath
Google and MSDN were indeed helpful here; additionally, piping objects to Get-Member can often be useful and educational. This question also shows how to manipulate shortcuts using PowerShell, and uses the same technique as seen here.
If you want the arguments to the executable as well, those are stored separately:
$arguments = $sh.CreateShortcut('<full-path-to-shortcut>').Arguments
Again, piping objects to Get-Member - in this case, the object returned by WScript.Shell.CreateShortcut() - provides useful information.
It should be noted that there are issues with using this technique and these calls when the path contains Unicode emoji characters; there is a workaround for this case in this StackOverflow question.
It may seem obvious to experts but to us simpletons there seems to be a key lightbulb moment here:
<full-path-to-shortcut> = the Full Name! Doh!
Make sure you use .FullName if you use Get_ChildItem | ForEach-Object, etc. with the Shell .CreateShortcut call if you want the current target of a shortcut. For me:
.CreateShortcut($_.FullName) returned an appropriate value; whereas
.CreateShortcut($_) returned 'null'
I apologize in advance if this is something simple, but I've been researching for a few days now and unable to resolve on my own or find another route to explore.
Essentially I have the below which works and returns exactly what I need:
([adsisearcher]'(&(objectClass=user (samaccountname='*dland*'))').FindOne().Properties['samaccountname']
which returns the username containing dland in it. I want to replace the dland with a variable ($usrNme1), but it errors out with "Unexpected token '$usrNme1'))'' in expression or statement."
I was able to get it working locally with using the ActiveDirectory module using the following:
Get-ADUser -Filter {SAMAccountName -like $usrNme1} | select-object -Property SAMAccountName
But unfortunately I cannot use that against other computers in this environment and have to find another way and this is as far as I've gotten to finding a replacement.
Any assistance here would be greatly appreciated :) This is the last piece of the puzzle for me and its frustrating being so close and not being able to figure it out! Thanks in advance for taking the time :)
Edit: Forgot to comment, this script is going to be pushed out and run locally on windows 7 machines, which is part of the reason why I can't use Get-ADUser.
Thanks,
David
Your query is a little malformed as it is missing a bracket after user but you can put variables in the string easily like in the following example. Variables placed inside double quotes will expand just fine* (Most of the time. Object parameters require subexpressions).
$accountname = "mcame*"
$query = "(&(objectClass=user)(samaccountname=$accountname))"
([adsisearcher]$query).FindOne().Properties['samaccountname']
Note: if you look at this question you will see issues doing the wildcard search that your are. If you have a large organization you might need to reconsider using leading and trailing asterices or whatever the plural is.
You original query
Aside from the bracket the reason it was not working was since you were using the single quotes. If you look at this resource it goes on to say
Comparative strings do NOT appear in quotation marks. A filter for the
displayName 'Philipp Foeckeler' would read as follows:
(displayName=Philipp Foeckeler).
Query should have worked without those inner quotes.
Try this:
$foo = '*jsm*'
([adsisearcher]"(&(objectClass=user) (samaccountname=$foo))")