Introduction to PowerShell

PowerShell incorporates both a command line interface and scripting language, and is designed to automate system tasks, as well as aid in configuration management. It was first released by Microsoft back in November 2006 for use in its Windows operating system, however, in August 2016, it was made open source and available on additional platforms including, macOS and various Linux distributions, such as Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat and CentOS.

PowerShell is built on the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR), with all inputs and outputs being .NET objects.

The Basics

Below are some of the basics of the PowerShell scripting language.

• Getting Started
• Variables
• Operators
• String Manipulation
• Dates and Times
• Escape Sequences
• Decision Making
• Loops
• Arrays
• Regular Expressions
• SQL Server – Importing Data
• SQL Server – Exporting Data (CSV)
• SQL Server – Exporting Data (XML)
• SQL Server – Exporting Data (JSON)
• SQL Server – Generating Data

Useful Stuff

• Code Snippets
• Batch File Renaming
• Batch File Search and Renaming
• Batch File Formatting
• Merging Files
• Checksum Utility

Links

• Further Resources