Month of Lunches - Day 13

In this chapter we are going to cover working with bunches of objects. This allows for the management of multiple PC's, services, or anything else to be managed across multiple computers with a single script or command. Don refers to this a Mass Management and it’s a very good interpretation of what you are doing.

There are a couple of different ways to accomplish tasks such as this. The first of which is the very basic ability to pipe objects from one cmdlet to another. For instance this example has come up in multiple chapters, but PLEASE DO NOT RUN THIS (unless you want to crash your computer).

               

                Get-Service | Stop-Service

Very simple what this command is doing is piping a collection of objects (in this case service objects) to the Stop-Service cmdlet and stopping them. This can be done with almost any of the Get cmdlets. This is the preferred way to work in PowerShell. If there is a cmdlet, use it. Don’t reinvent the wheel.

Sometimes cmdlets are not available and you have to find other ways to gather data and perform tasks against it. This is the case with WMI, and we covered this in more detail in chapter 11. Don uses a reference in the book of changing network configuration settings but a lot of the WMI objects have methods that allow for properties to be changed. You only need to know how to query for the information on your local as well as remote workstations and then pipe that information to the Invoke-WmiObjects to change the properties of that setting. This can be invaluable.

The next section is where things start to get a little trickier, especially for those of us that have no scripting or programming background. Enumerating of objects with the Foreach-Object cmdlet. Off to the help file I go and after about an hour of playing in my shell, reading the help, and web searching I think I have a better grasp of it. Basically it is a loop that checks each object of a collection and runs a command or set of commands that you designate. To put this as simply as possible here is an example from the help file.

               

                1, 2, $null, 4 | ForEach-Object {"Hello"}

What this will do is actually look at each string or variable as an object and display "HELLO" everytime it finds something. So what you will get as an output is: Hello, Hello, Hello, Hello. Imagine the possibilities of what can happen with this. I am still looking up info on this and ways that it can be used. Looking at scripts from my co-worker and basically anything that will be performed against multiple machines, accounts, services, etc… uses this method.

I Still have so much to learn and so far to go, but im loving every minute of it. Have a great day and happy powershelling.