PowerShell tutorial for beginners with basics Part2 will cover some basics of commands and how to create and run PowerShell scripts, as we have seen in first part “Powershell basis” why and who all can use PowerShell so let’s start-
Go to start option start typing PowerShell you will able to
see at least two option in your windows system, as it is already installed for
other OS please refer blog part1 for details
Option first will open the Console screen, like command
prompt as you may have used to run commands or batch files earlier, and option
two in screenshot will open PowerShell scripting environment with option to
search commands and write commands with intelliSense and see output at the same
time, this is really cool, we cover this in our next blog, I have shortlisted
some basic commands and let’s run some examples,
Get Help
PowerShell has over a hundreds of commands and introduced
so many new commands in recent version, mean there is a lot to learn interesting
things to make work easy, but don’t worry Microsoft has provided comprehensive
help system that can help you find commands to accomplish tasks, and it
explains how to use those commands.
The command for getting help is get-help and it accepts a variety of different arguments.
For example, to display the help file entry for the get-help command, type:
get-help get-help
And then press Enter.
Get-help also accepts a keyword for searching the
documentation, and returns a list of results containing that keyword. To export
any objects values to the csv (coma separated values, an excel file) you can
run:
get-help epCSV
Export-CSV – it exports file output into csv file, we
will see examples in next part of the blog
Help file entries are displayed directly in the console.
However, by using the parameter “online” you can open a web browser and view
the help on Microsoft’s TechNet website:
get-help Get-Host -online
I found it useful but it’s comparative slow to get result.
How you would create and run a PowerShell script (many series of commands or a program file)?
PowerShell file can be created with .ps1extension only. I
have created a file Fisrt
.ps1 for demo, here we will see how can we run and
create script.
Edit your file and add the following line:
Save the file and return to the PowerShell window. In
order to run the script, the most common method is by calling it:
& "C:\PS\First.ps1"
Or you can try to goto your folder and type file name
First.ps1 and hit enter
Just go ahead and try to do that while reading. You may
get an error with red text saying scripts have been disabled on your system.
This is normal behavior. In order to prevent malicious
scripts from running on your system, PowerShell enforces an execution policy.
There are 4 execution policies you can use:
·
Restricted – Scripts won’t run. Period. (Default
setting)
·
RemoteSigned – Locally-created scripts will run.
Scripts that were created on another machine will not run unless they are
signed by a trusted publisher.
·
AllSigned – Scripts will only run if signed by a
trusted publisher (including locally-created scripts).
·
Unrestricted – All scripts will run regardless
of who created them and whether or not they are signed.
In order to use our
newly-created script, we will have to modify our execution policy to allow our
script to run. Since we have not digitally signed our new script, our options
for setting the execution policy are left to “RemoteSigned” and “Unrestricted.”
We are going to change it to RemoteSigned.
In order to change the execution policy, we will need to
reopen PowerShell as an Administrator (the command will fail otherwise) and run
the following command:
Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
It will ask to verify that you really want to change the
execution policy. Go ahead and select Y for yes, then go ahead and close and
reopen your Powershell window.
After restarting the Powershell window, go ahead and try
running that script again
& "C:\PS\First.ps1"
Wow, good! You have completed your first script!
