Month of Lunches - Day 2

Ok so my first Blog Article on the Month Of Lunches learning adventure. Where to begin? I guess a little background on me I have loved computers my whole life, but my first real computer "Job" was the United States Navy. Anyone who is prior service with any branch of the military (except maybe the Air Force) will tell you that the learning process can be a little less ease in to it and a lot more trial by fire. Over my 5 years in the service and 10 years with the government I guess I would say I dabbled in a little of everything. That being said, I have zero background in programming and my command line experience comes almost entirely from Batch scripting program installations and patch deployments. This has been the majority of my life for the last 2+ years. I started to learn Powershell over a year ago from one of the local SysAdmins (our very own Powershell Evangelist Marc Carter). I have always been the type to say "Oh Programming is not for me", "I don't have the patience or the time to learn", or "I'll let someone else do it for me". But you have to start somewhere and I really want to advance in my chosen career field, so here it goes. On to the Content you are here for. What I have learned so far is that I can use almost all of my command line and batch scripting experience! Some things will change but for the most part I can use the same commands. This is incredible to me. Not having to immerse myself in code was a great relief. Easing in is a much better way to learn I think. PSDrives are going to be very helpful in a lot of situations. Imagine Being able to browse registry keys and values like they are directories. Makes for an incredibly powerful tool right? People generally don't play around in the registry but I have to dig into 3000+ systems on an almost daily basis. Knowing that soon enough I should be able to easily automate, aggregate, modify or display all the information I could want without much of a fight. WOW! I did run into one issue that took me a minute to figure out (Read as ‘A web search for answers'). I began this tutorial going through the command Shell and switched to the ISE, because it looks better. I was able to finish all the tasks of the Chapter, except for one. I Needed to Display the contents of a text file, that I had output the process information to, page by page. I couldn't figure out where I was going wrong with the syntax. Type c:\filename | More Looks right to me. Lets go back to the boot example. DIR | More Run this against the Windows\system32 directory. It just scrolls through the file and directory information. After slamming my head against a wall for 5 minutes I decided to look it up. Low and behold I was right it just didn't work. Apparently the ISE doesn't handle the | More piped command so well. Works fine in the shell though. I was able to finish and even on the first chapter learn a lot more than I already knew. Off to a great start.