Basic PowerShell Tricks and Notes Part 2¶

This page is designed for beginners and newcomers to PowerShell who want to quickly learn the essential basics, the most frequently used syntaxes, elements and and tricks. It should help you jump start your journey as a PowerShell user.

The main source for learning PowerShell is Microsoft Learn websites. There are extensive and complete guides about each command/cmdlet with examples.

PowerShell core at Microsoft Learn

You can also use the Windows Copilot for asking any PowerShell related questions, code examples etc.

This is part 2 of this series, find other parts here:

View All Predictive Intellisense Suggestions Based on Past History¶

Press F2 to see the complete list of the Predictive IntelliSense suggestions as you type on the PowerShell console.

More info

Where Is the Powershell Command History Stored?¶

In this directory

$env:USERPROFILE\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\PowerShell\PSReadLine

There is a file called ConsoleHost_history.txt and it contains the history of all the commands you've ever typed in PowerShell on your device. If you want to clear it, open the file, delete all of its content. If PowerShell is already open, close and reopen it to see the change.

You can open the file with this command

Invoke-Item -Path "$env:USERPROFILE\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\PowerShell\PSReadLine\ConsoleHost_history.txt"

You can use the following command to set the maximum remembered history to 1

Set-PSReadLineOption -MaximumHistoryCount 1

How to Clear the Automatic Error Variable in Powershell¶

$error.clear()

How to Get the Last Error Type in Powershell¶

$Error[0].Exception.GetType().FullName

How to Display All Environment Variables and Their Values in Powershell¶

gci env:

The env: drive is a PowerShell provider that exposes the environment variables as a hierarchical file system.
The gci command is an alias for the Get-ChildItem cmdlet.

List All MSCs and CPLs for Microsoft Management Console and Control Panels in Powershell¶

Get-ChildItem -Path C:\Windows\system32\* -Include *.msc, *.cpl | Sort-Object -Property Extension | Select-Object -Property Name | Format-Wide -Column 2

How to Mount the EFI System Partition?¶

mountvol u: /s

This isn't a native PowerShell cmdlet, it uses mountvol CLI.

With that command you can mount the EFI partition and assign the letter U to it, it will appear in This PC. You can browse it in PowerShell as admin.

How to Check if a File Is in Use in Powershell?¶

Here is an example function that tries to rename files given to it with the same names and if it was successful, it will consider that file not in use.

function IsFileAccessible {
    param ([System.String]$FullFileName)
    [System.Boolean]$IsAccessible = $false
    try {
        Rename-Item $FullFileName $FullFileName -ErrorVariable LockError -ErrorAction Stop
        $IsAccessible = $true
    }
    catch {
        $IsAccessible = $false
    }
    return $IsAccessible, $FullFileName
}

You can use it like this:

(Get-ChildItem -Path 'C:\Program Files\Windows Defender' -Filter '*.exe*').FullName | ForEach-Object { IsFileAccessible -FullFileName $_ }

Choosing Between Powershell and Powershell Preview¶

Use PowerShell Preview if you want to test new features and don't need to call PowerShell with its alias, pwsh, from CMD. If you do need to call it like that, use PowerShell stable.

Use cases for it are when you need to use pwsh.exe in Windows Task Scheduler.

PowerShell Preview by default doesn't set its pwsh.exe available system wide, the path to that file isn't added to the system environment variables, only PowerShell stable does that, but of course if you want to use PowerShell preview you can manually modify the PATH environment variable to have pwsh.exe of PowerShell Preview be available system wide.

Variable Types in Powershell¶

PowerShell variables can have types and type accelerator. The following command lists all of the types and their equivalent type accelerators. The fully qualified type names replace implicit with explicit.

[PSObject].Assembly.GetType('System.Management.Automation.TypeAccelerators')::Get

Success Codes and Error Codes¶

In PowerShell, or for programming languages in general, 0 = success, 1 or anything else means failure/error.

How to Get the Names and AppIDs of Installed Apps of the Current User in Powershell?¶

Get-StartApps

More info

Difference Between Async and Sync¶

Async is faster than Sync

Sync = waits for the previous task to finish before starting a new one
Async = starts multiple tasks simultaneously

PowerShell supports sync/async commands workflows, also known as parallel.

Note

A comment under this answer:

Oddly enough "Synchronously" means "using the same clock" so when two instructions are synchronous they use the same clock and must happen one after the other. "Asynchronous" means "not using the same clock" so the instructions are not concerned with being in step with each other. That's why it looks backwards, the term is not referring to the instructions relationship to each other. It's referring to each instructions relationship to the clock.

How to Enable a Disabled Event Log Using Powershell¶

First we create a new EventLogConfiguration object and pass it the name of the log we want to configure, then we set it to enabled and save the changes.

$LogName = 'Microsoft-Windows-DNS-Client/Operational'
$Log = New-Object -TypeName System.Diagnostics.Eventing.Reader.EventLogConfiguration -ArgumentList $LogName
$Log.IsEnabled = $true
$Log.SaveChanges()

We can confirm the change by running this command:

Get-WinEvent -ListLog Microsoft-Windows-DNS-Client/Operational | Format-List -Property *

Using the same method we can configure many other options of the log file, just take a look at the EventLogConfiguration Class for a list of configurable properties.

Find the Current User’s Username in Powershell¶

[Environment]::UserName

$env:username

whoami

[System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent().Name

Most secure way

Example

$UserSID = [System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent().user.value
(Get-LocalUser | Where-Object -FilterScript { $_.SID -eq $UserSID }).name

How to Access Properties of an Object in Powershell¶

For example, you can first assign the entire object to a variable:

$Preferences = Get-MpPreference

Then call properties of that variable

$Preferences.PUAProtection

Another method is this:

$(Get-MpPreference).puaprotection

Dot-Sourcing¶

To dot-source a PowerShell function in the same script file, you can use the dot operator . followed by the path of the script file containing the function. The path can be relative or absolute. Here's an example:

# Contents of MyFunctions.ps1
function New-Function {
    Write-Host "Hello World!"
}

# Contents of Main.ps1
. .\MyFunctions.ps1

New-Function

In this example, Main.ps1 dot-sources MyFunctions.ps1 using the dot operator and then calls MyFunction. When you run Main.ps1, it will output Hello World! to the console.

The dot operator tells PowerShell to execute the script file in the current scope instead of a new scope. This means that any functions or variables defined in the script file will be available in the current scope.

A Custom Script to Generate Random Words in Powershell¶

# Generate four variables with random names
$TotallyRandomNamesArray = @() # Create an empty array to store the names
for ($i = 0; $i -lt 4; $i++) {
    # Loop four times
    $Chars = [CHAR[]](Get-Random -Minimum 97 -Maximum 123 -Count 11) # Generate random English letters
    $Chars[0] = [CHAR]::ToUpper($Chars[0]) # Change the first character to upper-case
    $TotallyRandomNamesArray += -join $Chars # Add the name to the array
}
# Assign the names from the Names array to the individual variables
$TotallyRandomName1, $TotallyRandomName2, $TotallyRandomName3, $TotallyRandomName4 = $TotallyRandomNamesArray

How to See All the Shared Folders and Drives¶

Get-CimInstance -Class Win32_Share

There are other ways that are not native PowerShell cmdlets, such as

net view \\$env:computername /all

And

net share

Also visible from Computer => System Tools => Shared Folders => Shares

An Example of Using -F Format Operator¶

Write-output("The drivername {0} is vulnerable with a matching SHA256 hash of {1}" -f $Filename, $SHA256)

More info

How to List All of the Positional Parameters of a Cmdlet¶

In this example we use the

Get-Help -Name 'Get-ChildItem' -Parameter * |
Sort-Object -Property position |
Select-Object -Property name, position

How to Get the Number of Fans and Details About Them in Powershell¶

(Get-CimInstance -Namespace root/CIMV2 -ClassName Win32_Fan).count
Get-CimInstance -Namespace root/CIMV2 -ClassName Win32_Fan

P.S VMs don't have fans.

How to Get the Last Reboot Time in Powershell¶

[System.DateTime](Get-CimInstance -ClassName win32_operatingsystem -ComputerName $_.Name).LastBootUpTime

How to Add a PS Custom Object to Another PS Custom Object¶

You can use the Add-Member cmdlet with the -InputObject parameter. The -InputObject parameter specifies the custom object that you want to add a property to, and the -Value parameter specifies the custom object that you want to add as a property. For example, you can use this code to add the $CustomObject to another custom object called $ParentObject:

$HashTable = @{
    Name = 'Alice'
    Age = 25
    Occupation = 'Teacher'
}
$CustomObject = [PSCustomObject]$HashTable

# Create another custom object
$ParentObject = [PSCustomObject]@{
    ID = 123
    Location = 'London'
}

# Add the $CustomObject as a property to the $ParentObject
Add-Member -InputObject $ParentObject -MemberType NoteProperty -Name Child -Value $CustomObject

Use CRLF Instead of LF for End of Line Characters¶

In Visual Studio Code for example, you can see at the bottom right corner whether your end of line sequence is set to CRLF or LF, Windows uses CRLF.

When you upload a PowerShell script to GitHub you need to make sure it's set to CRLF. PowerShell codes that are signed have big signature blocks at the end of them. PowerShell expects CRLF when doing authenticode signatures. You can also add those scripts to a .gitattribute config to your repo so that PowerShell files are uploaded with CRLF and not with LF.

How to Securely Get the Temp Directory's Path¶

[System.IO.Path]::GetTempPath()

A less secure way is this

$env:Temp

The problem with the 2nd method is that if the path is long, contains too many spaces or contains non-English characters, it might lead to pattern matching using ~1.

How to Securely Get the User Directory's Path¶

The Get-CimInstance cmdlet can query the Win32_UserProfile class and filter by the current user's SID to get the LocalPath property, which is the path of the current user's profile directory. This method is more accurate than using the environment variable.

(Get-CimInstance Win32_UserProfile -Filter "SID = '$([System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent().User.Value)'").LocalPath

A less secure or accurate way is this

$env:USERPROFILE

How to Run Multiple Kernel Drivers In PowerShell¶

If you have a folder full of .bin driver files, you can use the following command to create a kernel service and run them one by one.

This can be useful for testing drivers against a deployed WDAC policy.

(Get-ChildItem "C:\drivers").FullName | ForEach-Object -begin {$global:i=1} -Process {
    sc create "DriverTest$global:i" type=kernel binpath="$_"
    Start-Sleep -Seconds 1
    Start-Service -Name "DriverTest$global:i" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
    $global:i++
}

How to Run PowerShell Code in CMD/Batch¶

Example, the code has no double quotes inside it

powershell.exe -Command "$UserSID = [System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent().user.value;(Get-LocalUser | where-object {$_.SID -eq $UserSID}).name"

Example, the code has double quotes inside it. We have to escape double quotes with \"

powershell.exe -Command "$UserSID = [System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent().user.value;$UserName = (Get-LocalUser | where-object {$_.SID -eq $UserSID}).name;Get-Process | where-object {$_.path -eq "\"C:\Users\$UserName\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Edge SxS\Application\msedge.exe\""} | ForEach-Object {Stop-Process -Id $_.id -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue}"

A good related answer from StackOverflow