Keith Hill has a fun blog post on using Unicode characters in PowerShell function names. Here’s an example from his article using the square root symbol for the square root function. PS> function √($num) { [Math]::Sqrt($num) } PS> √ 81…
Blog Archives
How to grep Twitter
Twitter has an extensive search API. To build the URL for a query, start with the base http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=. To search for a word, just append that word to the base, such as http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=Coltrane to search for tweets containing “Coltrane.” To…
Free PowerShell eBook from Keith Hill
Keith Hill has turned his Effective PowerShell series of blog posts into a 50-page PDF. He just posted Effective Windows PowerShell yesterday.
DSLs in PowerShell
In an earlier post, I quoted John Lam saying that one reason Ruby is such a good language for implementing DSLs (domain specific languages) is that function calls do not require parentheses. This allows DSL authors to create functions that…
PowerShell A-Z series completed
Joe Pruitt has finished his PowerShell A-Z series.
Joe Pruitt’s PowerShell ABCs
I just ran across a nice series of PowerShell posts by Joe Pruitt called the “PowerShell ABC’s,” one post for each letter of the alphabet. He’s up to O so far. Arithmetic operators Begin CmdLet Debugging Execution policy Format operator…
PowerShell version 2 timetable
Looks like it will be another year until PowerShell version 2 comes out. See Dmitry’s PowerBlog for details.
Table-driven text munging in PowerShell
In my previous post, I mentioned formatting C++ code as HTML by doing some regular expression substitutions. I often need to write something that carries out a list of pattern substitutions, so I decided to rewrite the previous script to…
Manipulating the clipboard with PowerShell
The PowerShell Community Extensions contain a couple handy cmdlets for working with the Windows clipboard: Get-Clipboard and Out-Clipboard. One way to use these cmdlets is to copy some text to the clipboard, munge it, and paste it somewhere else. This…
Regular expressions in PowerShell and Perl
This is one of the most popular pages on my web site: Regular expressions in PowerShell and Perl It’s about how you use regular expressions in PowerShell — how to do matches, replacements, etc. — rather than the grammar of…
Experimenting with Out-Speech in PowerShell
I’ve played around with the PSCX script Out-Speech at home and at work. At home, running Vista, words come out in a natural female voice. At work, running XP, words come out in a robotic male voice. The voice is somewhat…
Depend on objects, not their presentation
The most recent blog post by Jeffrey Snover emphasizes that PowerShell pipes objects, not text. When you use single PowerShell commands, you can get the impression that they output text. But everything is an object until the pipeline spills onto…
PowerShell posts classified
Here’s a summary of the blog posts I’ve written so far regarding PowerShell, grouped by topic. Three posts announced CodeProject articles related to PowerShell: automated software builds, text reviews for software, and monitoring legacy code. Three posts on customizing the…
PowerShell output redirection: Unicode or ASCII?
What does the redirection operator > in PowerShell do to text: leave it as Unicode or convert it to ASCII? The answer depends on whether the thing to the right of the > operator is a file or a program.…
Improved PowerShell prompt
A while back I wrote a post on how to customize your PowerShell prompt. Last week Tomas Restrepo posted an article on a PowerShell prompt that adds color and shortens the path in a more subtle way. I haven’t tried…
