Article on automating your powershell reports

Automating PowerShell Reports, Part 1

For those of you stuck doing the really boring but necessary work on windows server, here is a good article on automating powershell reports. 

Uninstalling Powershell...

While upgrading an XP installation to Vista, the Vista compatibility check informed me that Windows Powershell must be uninstalled before installation can proceed. Going into Add or Remove programs did not show any entry for Powershell.

Turns out Powershell installs as an update to windows. You have to click on "show updates", and scroll through tons of security fixes and hotfixes. You'll find an entry for Windows Powershell 1.0, and your Vista upgrade should then install after that.

powershell

I am just getting started with Powershell, and I found that you can "cat", "clear", and "ls" just like in a Unix shell. You can pipe stuff (from here):

ls | out-file "dir-listing.txt" (where out-file is a cmdlet)

The above will output a file listing, and the out-file cmdlet will write that to a file called "dir-listing.txt" in the current directory.

"cat dir-listing.txt" to check file contents.

You can download powershell from here.