With great PowerShell comes great responsibility

Power to the Shell

Article from ADMIN 09/2012

By Ken Hess

Windows administrators, like Unix or Linux administrators, look for ways to perform their duties with ease and elegance through automation, which makes PowerShell a Windows administrator's best friend.

PowerShell allows administrators to gather information, change Registry parameters, work with Active Directory, manipulate services, look at events, work with Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), and much more. In this introduction to PowerShell [1], I outline some of the more common problems that administrators face and how to solve them with PowerShell. You won't need programming skills, nor do you need to be adept at scripting of any kind. PowerShell handles the complex tasks behind the scenes by allowing you to work with a series of shortcut commands and parameters (switches) in the foreground.

The strength of PowerShell lies in its simplicity. The cmdlets are easy to learn, easy to use, and easy to extend into an essential toolset for which there is no equivalent. The excitement of PowerShell comes from the ability to manage other systems remotely with cmdlets. PowerShell bestows great power on Windows Administrators – power that, used wisely, will save time, effort, and frustration in environments where hundreds or thousands of systems require attention. PowerShell is in a state of flux; it evolves with each iteration of Microsoft's operating systems. Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 use PowerShell 2.0, which I use here. Windows 8 and Windows Server 8 will use the new PowerShell 3.0, to be released soon.

To begin, I introduce PowerShell information retrieval to you via the "Get" commands (cmdlets), which allow you to look at system information in a non-destructive way without changing anything. Think of the Get cmdlets as information browsing. Then, I show you how to retrieve information and change it. Finally, I teach you how to control services, processes, and commands on your local system and on remote systems.