$numbers = 1..31 #check out http://www.nbc.com/Heroes/novels/novels_library.shtml to see how many are online

$downloadFolder = "c:\Download\HeroesNovels" ;

$downloadFolder | %{ if (!(test-path $_)) { md $_ | out-null } } ;

$webclient = new-object System.Net.WebClient ;
$numbers = $numbers | %{ $_.ToString().PadLeft(3, "0") } |
    where { (!(test-path "$downloadFolder\Heroes_novel_$_.pdf"))
}

if ($numbers) { #FYI: same as saying ($numbers -ne $null)
    $i=0;
    $numbers | %{
        $i++;
        write-progress "Downloading" "Heroes" -percent ($i / $numbers.count * 100) ;
        $webclient.DownloadFile("http://www.nbc.com/Heroes/novels/downloads/Heroes_novel_$_.pdf", "$downloadFolder\Heroes_novel_$_.pdf") ;
    } ;
    Write-Progress "Downloading" "Heroes" -completed
}


$listOfFiles = "open secret.ftplocation.com
user username password
binary
cd LocationICareAbout
mdir * -" | ftp -i -n | where {$_.Trim() -ne "" } | where {$_.SubString(24,5) -ne "<DIR>"} | %{ $_.SubString(39) }


To explain: FTP can accepted piped-input, but I realized instead of having to put my answerfile into an actual file, I could just use powershell's ability to have multi-line strings and variables pumped right in.

The above text is logging into the ftp location client of yer choice and getting a file listing (the msdir bit). As I only cared about files, I ignore the "<DIR>"s, and with a bit of basic string manipulation, viola! I've got a list of all files in a given directory


$cmd = "open secret.ftplocation.com
user username password
binary
cd LocationICareAbout
" +
($listOfFiles | %{ "get ""$_""`n" })

$cmd | ftp -i -n


To explain: This final bit turns the list of files into another literal string, which says
   get FileX
   get FileY
etc, which gets piped to ftp. the end result is a download of all the files in the directory to my hard drive. Of course, you could get creative and do all sorts of manipulations to $listOfFiles, if that's what turns you on.

I've got another nearly identical script where instead of "get" I say "delete", same concepts. And got another one that builds up $listOfFiles from a local directory (via ls) and uses "put" to upload all files from a local dir to the remote dir. You get the idea.

ftp supposedly supports a -s:filename but I couldn't get it to work. And really, who would want to? Inlining the ftp commands is just so damn sexy!

After Thoughts:
(wherein I blather on and on and get less technical)

Man I had a blast doing this. Within about two hours I'd gone from ftp n00b to having working scripts that actually helped me do my job much faster. I'd been using my favorite abadonware ftp gui to do uploads/downloads and now I had scripts that did it all faster and consistently.

A nice bite-sized problem involving unknown, but good, tools combined with the joy of the admin development model meant figuring it all out was fun for me. The scripts are pretty basic, really, but figuring junk out makes me go a big rubbery one :P

Really, it's that lovely admin development model more than anything else I think I love. (I've done lots of it over my life, but only ever heard the phrase thanks to powershell blogs.) I have built up so many extrodinarily useful scripts over the last few months, by typing commands into a stupid blue window until they worked, then pasting them into notepad and saving it.

Within another month or two I'll have fully automated processes at my job that used to take up days and days and days of peoples times. Of course, it would only take 1 or 2 weeks of dedicated time to do it all, but we all know how that goes.. no one's going to give you official time to fix anything, not that you've got time when everything needs to be done yesterday, so you gotta slip it under the wire. But then! To the rescue! Comes that lovely admin development model (some people might call it agile development too), where I don't have to do it all at once. I just have to add a few more lines to my powershell scripts here and there, and one day *poof* the entire process is a repeatable automated one-liner instead of a clusterfuck of a timewasting error prone inconsistent undocumented manual process.

All part of my grand plan for world domination. One dirty hack at a time.

Damn, old dos habits die hard. In fact, it makes perfect sense ("SubDir" does not contain a ".", if it did it would be copied). But still, I wish someone else had spent that hour or two debuging the problem.

In case you can't be bothered, powershell's remove-item crashes with
"The specified path, file name, or both are too long. The fully qualified file name must be less than 260 characters, and the directory name must be less than 248 characters."
Then cmd.exe's rd /s /q works just fine. cmd.exe.

Seriously. How. The. Fuck. Does this ship? How the fuck am I unable to delete files that the Operating System will allow me to create? When cmd.exe works? I'm sure there's a really interesting reason why this error happens. Some bizarre technical reason, or, more likely, some political tale about how people wanted to fix it, and couldn't. You know, the type of stuff that makes the daily wtf a popular site. But I don't care. Not right now.

Right now, I want Powershell to work at least as good as what it desires to replace.

I'm thinking there's a solution involving set-alias rm, but I haven't coded it yet... (probably won't either)

$a = new-object -com InternetExplorer.Application
$a.visible=$true
$a.Navigate2("http://www.microsoft.com")

What's the equivalent to cmd.exe's start /wait command (thanks PowerShell Guy)

$notepad = [System.Diagnostics.Process]::Start( "notepad.exe" )
$notepad.WaitForExit(2000) #wait 2 seconds
$notepad.WaitForExit() #wait forever
# Note: CodePlex has a Start-Process cmdlet that looks promising

Retrieving Version Numbers from DLLs and EXEs (thanks Time is an illusion)

ls c:\windows\*.exe | get-fileversion

Download from an RSS Feed (thanks Abhishek)

#Create the Service Endpoint Url
$url=("http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss?p=" + "90210")
#download the rss feed and cast to xml
$webclient = new-object System.Net.WebClient
$weatherData=[xml]$webclient.DownloadString($url)
echo $weatherData.rss.Channel.item.Title

Or just download a website contents

$webclient = new-object System.Net.WebClient
$webclient.DownloadString(”http://server/location”)

Someone figured out how to upload files to fickr via PowerShell. Haha! Neat!

Invoking Script Blocks from C# looks simple… as long as you know how. (thanks Windows PowerShell)

try Installing CodePlex for things lots of useful new commands. Some of them, like Set-FileDate (touch), Out-Clipboard and Test-Xml should just get bundled in by default.

You can trap and re-throw exceptions. The documentation seems non-existant, but someone was kind enough to release a chapter of their book for free. (Thanks Windows PowerShell)

I was already a big .Net fan and had heard (but forgotten) about PowerShell until our IT guy suggested it for a problem I was having. The hype was promising (object manipulation instead of string parsing! egads!). I read lots, the install was simple and I started playing around. After a few days I forced myself to switch my always-on shell window to PowerShell instead of cmd.exe.

The manuals that came were helpful to start, although I learned most of the basics from online articles. I wish a more complete user manual (that had syntax examples of scripts for example) would come by default. It feels like the product shipped without help. Although, the get-help command within PowerShell is fantastic. You guys did an awesome job with the contents of get-help.

As a asp.net developer I was more interested in the file-manipulation stuff that could help us with out daily build and .net1.1 -> 2.0 migration. Within less then 2 day I switched us from .bat files to .ps1 files, PowerShell was that good. It saved me time and gave me new options almost instantly. It was the reason I first started this blog.

I love that everything is .Net objects, I love the piping of commands ala unix. It's like being able to work with sql-like commands (ie, set operations) but with any .net object -- fantastic! It scaled from quick & dirty admin-style scripts to full programatic logic control features, exceptions.

And so perl like. Ugh. That took me a while to get over. Why is the command "." instead of a descriptive "include" keyword? to continue the glorious cryptic command-line traditions?

Oh, and the biggest headache I've had thus far? Calling existing command-line tools from powershell. Passing parameters with spaces always seems to break things as PowerShell interprets variables it's way, instead of the way my mental-model expects them too. Which, I guess, is more .bat file like; expecting environment variable-expansion. So, given that you've got a file called listparams.bat:

echo parameters were %*

and the command

.\listparams.bat -buildfile:hi.txt

in cmd.exe, it yeilds

parameters were -buildfile:hi.txt

but in Powershell.exe it yields

parameters were -buildfile: hi.txt

notice the space in the output.

These subtle differences are very frustrating. This particular example is painful when using nant and it's -buildfile: parameter.

Overall I like PowerShell though. Fan-frakking-tastic.

Generate list of .wiki files into a directory listing text file

BUT. It's better to use sc (set-content) to write non-utf16, so filesize is smaller and controllable and non-binary for svn (thanks soapyfrog)

Make a variable with files that exist in both the DevPlan and GeoWiki sub-directory

whow, that "if" statement is clunky. it's better to use where to filter out common files

Launch those files as FlexWiki-compatible browser URLs

Cache applicationLaunch 10 copies of a url, for both for two sub-domains (Fellow T.G.'ers should peep this)

Determine the svn revision and url of the current directory

Delete any non-svn-controlled Files

(via Windows PowerShell)

(via The Powershell Guy)

Printable documentation is really sparse (it includes a quickstart guide and a "user guide", which is missing lots of stuff), but the documentation within the powershell on individual commands is really very very good. I listed the powershell blogs I subscribing to below.. I've found them helpful at times, but it's kinda hit-or-miss. The biggest problem I've had is just discovering the basics of how to do things (how do I define a function, how do I make a .ps1 file that accepts parameters (param statement, just like in functions)). But it's totally worth it. Powershell roxors!

Good web pages:

• good first read
• awesome quick reference
• A few more powershell webpages I've tagged
• Script repository that's in its infancy, I haven't used it, but sysadmin/it types might find interesting

Official Blog RSS link

• http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/rss.xml

Other Blogs RSS links I'm using right now:

• http://jtruher.spaces.live.com/feed.rss
• http://mybsinfo.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
• http://abhishek225.spaces.live.com/feed.rss
• http://monadblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default