For the longest time I have not been a fan of embracing the shell in the Windows world, but more and more I find that Powershell is able to do the things that I need. I suppose my seething hatred was in part due to my negative bias towards Windows and the lack of useful tools from the command line in Windows. Increasingly lately, I have been changing the way I think about and utilize the command line in Windows with Powershell. And to be honest, I’m really beginning to fall in love with Powershell the more I get work with it and the more I get to see how to apply it in Windows based environments. The good news is that Microsoft has put a lot of effort into this and are adding improvements and features all the time. It still has a long way to go, but I can already see this as an alternative to GUI based administration in the Windows world and finally begin to feel like I can see the promise land on the horizon. Using Powershell has been somewhat of a paradigm shift (in my opinion anyways) to how to do Windows administration recently and I feel like it will only get stronger and more common in the years to come. So in this post I will try to show you some of the flexibility as well as some of the power that Powershell has to offer with some great tools from the community.
To highlight what I am talking about, let’s talk about grep, a well known and loved tool in the *nix universe. I love grep. For the longest time, I hadn’t known of a way to grep in the Windows world until just recently with a wonderful third party Powershell module called Find-String. There are a few commands that you need to get this working. To start, we need to get a module installed that is basically used for package management. This tool is called PsGet. Installation is super simple, just run the following from a Powershell prompt, and ensure that your execution policy is set at least at remotesigned (Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned if you don’t have this turned on).
(new-object Net.WebClient).DownloadString(“http://psget.net/GetPsGet.ps1“) | iex
This should go out, download and install PsGet for you. Once all that has completed you should be able to install Powershell modules that are contained in the PsGet repository. With this installed we can just reach out to the PsGet repo and install our module.
Install-Module Find-String
Easy, simple, and clean. That is the best part, there isn’t a ton of leg work to get this stuff working correctly and is why I’m enjoying Powershell so much these days. Now we have a very functional grep clone! Usage is quite a bit similar to grep, fore help you can do a Get-Help Find-String or look at the link I posted earlier to the author’s github page. If you want to look for a word or substring in a file just use something like this:
Find-String word example.txt
This will output all occurrences of the word you are looking for in the file example.txt. Here is a screen shot to show you.
What other cool Powershell stuff are you doing? I would love to hear about other cool uses that can be beneficial in every day use.
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