Do you have photos and videos that you have taken over the years that are scattered all over the place? Do you want to have all your photos and videos organized? Do you want all your photos and videos to have a standardized naming scheme? If you answered YES to these questions, then this is the post for you. In this post, I will provide you with the PowerShell code and examples for how to use the Media Sync script. The Media Sync script utilizes the Shell.Application COM object to gather file metadata. Only files that have a picture or video metadata type will be processed. The script uses the date taken for pictures and the media created metadata fields to organize the photos and videos. If there is no date taken or media created available for a given file, the script will use the modify date instead. The script also ensures that you won’t have any duplicate files by checking the file hashes of the two files in question. If the script detects duplicate files, it will only keep one copy of the file. There are also tools included to help you cleanup unwanted files or folders, delete empty directories and find duplicate files. The script has a simple menu driven PowerShell GUI similar to what I did in a previous post
. The Media Sync PowerShell script provides the following features:
In this post, we are going to setup NetNeighbor Watch on a Raspberry Pi. NetNeighbor Watch can keep an eye on your network and send you an email when a new host is discovered. NetNeighbor Watch is done completely in PowerShell. The results are very similar to those of arpwatch. NetNeighbor Watch is for anyone that wants more visibility into the wireless or wired devices on their network. We will also setup a weekly email report with all of the known hosts on your network. In this post, I will walk you through the entire process of setting this up from scratch on a Raspberry Pi, lets get started!
Do you have PowerShell code that you reuse in your scripts over and over? Do you have server names hard coded in variables? Are you using a text file or CSV file to import server names? Do you find yourself only utilizing one server out of a cluster of servers to make your PowerShell commands? These are the questions I asked myself and the answer used to be YES. In this post, I will go over how you can store your infrastructure server information in a SQL database and call that data from a custom PowerShell module. By utilizing this method, you can expect the below benefits:
Over the years, I have supported and created multiple types of GUIs. I finally decided a few years ago to create a very simple menu driven PowerShell GUI. I wanted something that was very powerful yet very simple to maintain. I really enjoy automating manual administrative tasks, so that is what drove this project in the first place. Before I created the menu driven PowerShell GUI, I had directories and directories of very specific scripts to do specific tasks. I decided to standardize and consolidate all of those scripts into one menu driven PowerShell GUI. By doing this, I took the guess work out of determining which PowerShell script to run for a given task. This has greatly helped my colleagues know exactly what to run and how. Feel free to check it out for yourself at my site:
SpiderZebra.com
. While you’re there, you can take a look at a few of my other related posts:
Developers are likely to be familiar with ternary conditional operators as they’re legal in many languages (Ruby, Python, C++, etc). They’re also often used in coding interviews to test an applicant as they can be a familiar source of code errors. While some developers couldn’t care less about ternary operators, there’s been a cult following waiting for them to show up in Powershell. That day is almost upon us. Any Powershell developer can easily be forgiven for scratching their heads and wondering what a ternary is. In the most basic sense a ternary evaluates an expression to a binary result and carries out one of two possible outcomes. Lets start by looking at some code examples:
I’m going to file this under “Either I’m a genius, or there’s a much better way and everyone knows it except for me.”
I recently began adding a suite of Pester tests to one of my projects and I found myself needing to mock some unit tests against a particular function that would modify a variable based on the parameter specified. Since all the functions I write nowadays are considered advanced functions (and yours should be too, they’re free!), I discovered a nice way to test the function’s actions using the
What is a constrained endpoint and why would I need one?
Powershell constrained endpoints are a means of interacting with powershell in a manner consistent with the principal of least privilege. In Powershell terms, this is referred to as Just-Enough-Administration, or JEA.
JEA is very well documented, so this won’t simply be repeating everything those references detail. Instead, we’ll go through a simple, real-world use-case of when and why you might need to deploy one.
I have written a short excerpt on how to pass parameters from an object to a Pester test. I have turned this into a function: Invoke-POVTest. The function is primarily for operational validation tests, where you might have a single operational test but you need to test multiple cases. (Sorry, I am not quite sure if I described it properly). I’ll be interested in any feedback.
You can certainly find a number of articles around that present PowerShell pitfalls that can easily trip you up if you are not careful. I took a different approach in my three-part series, A Plethora of PowerShell Pitfalls. The first two parts are presented in quiz format, together covering the top 10 “gotchas”. They will help you test your awareness to see if you even realized the danger and did not know you’ve been skirting those traps for awhile. After you’ve had an opportunity to consider the conundrums presented, I then go into detailed explanations for why they happen and how to fix them. The third and final part is a compendium of all the common “gotchas” that I put together after reviewing all the other lists out there. The more than 35 entries in the list cover, I believe, a good 98% of the issues you would likely encounter. Yes, there are more esoteric pitfalls as well, but I ran out of web page… 🙂 Part 1: Pesky Parameter Problems Part 2: A Portion of Potential Puzzles Part 3: The Compendium
Pipelining is an important concept in PowerShell. Though the idea did not originate with PowerShell (you can find it used decades earlier in Unix, for example), PowerShell does provide the unique advantage of being able to pipeline not just text, but first-class .NET objects. Pipelining has several advantages:
It helps to conserve memory resources. Say you want to modify text in a huge file. Without a pipeline you might read the huge file into memory, modify the appropriate lines, and write the file back out to disk. If it is large enough you might not even have enough memory to read the whole thing.
It can substantially improve actual performance. Commands in a pipeline are run concurrently-even if you have only a single processor, because when one process blocks, for example, while reading a large chunk of your file, then another process in the pipeline can do a unit of work in the meantime.
It can have a significant effect on your end-user experience, enhancing the perceived performance dramatically. If your end-user executes a sequence of commands that takes 60 seconds, then until 60 seconds has elapsed he/she would see nothing without pipelining, whereas output could start appearing almost immediately with pipelining.
PowerShell provides a variety of techniques for using pipelining but it is all to easy to do it wrong, so you think you are pipelining but in fact you are not. In my article Ins and Outs of the PowerShell Pipeline, I discuss the most common things that can trip you up with implementing pipelining and how to avoid them.
