April, 2006

Most errors which occur in your working scripts are likely to be "non-terminating". This means that Monad just reports the error and the command keeps running. ("Terminating" errors such as syntax errors will halt the command and, in some cases, the entire...

Often when playing with .Net objects in Monad, I need to use MSDN class library reference to learn how to use a particular type and its members. Now, I have my bookmarks and favorite search engine but I always thought it would be cool if get-member cmdlet...

After reading Marcel's introductory piece on ScriptBlock, I decided to rewrite an old script of mine that checks the spelling of all text files in a directory. Here is what I came out with. #region Parse a line to a list of words $StringFind = ...

MoW, a Monad newsgroup regular, asked why only the Caption, Name and PeakUsage properties were displayed from the command “get-WMIObject Win32_PageFileUsage” while the output object had a lot more properties. I think it is worth it to explain in details...

Monad provides a way to create new com objects with new-object $ie = New-Object -ComObject InternetExplorer.Application $ie.Navigate2( http://blogs.msdn.com/monad ) $ie.Visible=1 Great but what about if you want to bind to an existing object? Where...

Today I came across http://scripts.readify.net/ . This sight is focused on Monad and MSH and is starting a collection of scripts at: http://scripts.readify.net/Scripts.aspx . You should visit their site and let them know what type of scripts would be...

Administrators often want to monitor the event logs and look for specific error conditions. The most capable way to do this, of course, is to use a dedicated monitoring application such as Microsoft Operations Manager , or get down-and-dirty with the...

Kurt asked the question "why not Noun-Verb vs Verb-Noun" in his post: http://blogs.msdn.com/monad/archive/2006/02/16/533522.aspx#574708 There are lots of answers to this some better than others. Let me rattle off a couple of them: VMS DCL/AS400...

In our newsgroup (Microsoft.Public.Windows.Server.Scripting) , Mark Ayers asked the question: > Shouldn't best practice for scripts be full command name? The answer is YES, NO, and MAYBE. YES - Full names provide the most readable experience...

<Edited to convert Match-String to Select-String 7/9/2006> In our newsgroup (Microsoft.Public.Windows.Server.Scripting) , Vasu asked about how Select-string works in pipelines: Here is what I observe: 1. MSH C:\> get-alias ..truncated...

Exploring types is a pain! Monad provides Get-Member which makes it pretty nice to explore an OBJECT but if you want to explore that object's type, you have to use the capabilities of the System.RuntimeType class. Let me make that distinction a...

I strongly encourage people to let us know where we could be doing better and to let us know if we are getting into the weeds. I believe that being open to such bad news is core to the the virtuous cycle of self improvement so such feedback provides opportunities...

M ost shells (such as Windows CMD.EXE and the UNIX shells SH, KSH, CSH, and BASH) operate by executing a command or utility in a new process, and presenting the results (or errors) to the user as text. Text-based processing is the way in which system...

In this blog I will try to explain different features of sort-object(Sort) cmdlet. For the purpose of this blog, I assume the following objects exist: MSH C:\temp\monad> $a,$b,$c,$d Score Name ----- ---- 100 John 90 Henry 90...

When scripting with MSH one of the most useful things to know about are scriptblocks (lambda functions). Scriptblocks are compiled bits of MSH script which you can pass around and invoke whenever you feel like it. They turn out to be so useful that if...

Most scripters are familar with Microsoft script center. Script center now has a portal for Microsoft Command Shell. You can access the portal at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx -Arul Kumaravel [ Edit: Monad has now been...

In the very early days of Monad, we focused on a world where everyone would publish Cmdlets and providers. Cmdlets and providers were designed around providing the best user experience. They provide the right, high-level, task-oriented abstractions that...

One of the traditional challenges with scripting is dealing with different CULTURES. Imagine the case where you are writing a script and you'll have to parse datetime string from different cultures. If it was just one culture, you could set the process...

Did your command or script fail and/or report an error? We hope to have a proper script debugger in a future version, but until then, MSH has some handy features to help you figure out what went wrong. In this series of blog entries, I will present some...

Did your command or script fail and/or report an error? We hope to have a proper script debugger in a future version, but until then, MSH has some handy features to help you figure out what went wrong. In this series of blog entries, I will present some...

Did your command or script fail and/or report an error? We hope to have a proper script debugger in a future version, but until then, MSH has some handy features to help you figure out what went wrong. In this series of blog entries, I will present some...

Did your command or script fail and/or report an error? We hope to have a proper script debugger in a future version, but until then, MSH has some handy features to help you figure out what went wrong. In this series of blog entries, I will present some...

Did your command or script fail and/or report an error? We hope to have a proper script debugger in a future version, but until then, MSH has some handy features to help you figure out what went wrong. In this series of blog entries, I will present some...

Did your command or script fail and/or report an error? We hope to have a proper script debugger in a future version, but until then, MSH has some handy features to help you figure out what went wrong. In this series of blog entries, I will present some...

Did your command or script fail and/or report an error? We hope to have a proper script debugger in a future version, but until then, MSH has some handy features to help you figure out what went wrong. In this series of blog entries, I will present some...