Windows PowerShell Hands On Training

1. PowerShell 01 Course Introduction & Environment Setup: Hello you, awesome people and welcome to this PowerShell learning series. Anybody can script. My name is Vijay, and I'm going to take you through these series of tutorials. Now, you may be wondering, why would I choose title like anybody can script? Who ****, let me tell you, I got into this IT world after completing my graduation in chemistry. So coming from the background that had no direct relationship with any programming languages or computers for that matter. If I can teach PowerShell, then definitely anybody, just anybody can script in PowerShell, right? So that is the justification of this title. Now, who this series is for? Where it is for absolute, absolute beginners. I don't expect you to know PowerShell at all. And after completing this series, you will be having a fair idea to be able to use PowerShell in your day-to-day job. If you are my regular student, you might have already enrolled in my various PowerShell courses, which are available on different platforms. Right? Then already I have so many PowerShell trainings. Why would I create a new one? And that two, for beginners means I had to teach what I have already taught in so many courses. Why not pick some advanced topic? Well, the thing is my existing courses, or for those who have at least some basic awareness of scripting languages. While this one, I don't expect you to know anything about scripting, right? So that is the difference. And another difference is when I record regular courses, I have to do a lot of homework, right? I have to prepare a nice scraped presentation, then record the session, do editing and all. But this time I'm not freezing the Linda and neither I'm going to write the script for lectures. So the sessions are going to be more of life and more fun. You know, you are almost going to get the experience of a live seminar. Whatever I have learned from my experiences, I'm going to share them all over here. So sit back and enjoy this learning experience. Don't take that literally. On few occasions, no harm in trying out the commands which are being shown on your screen. All right, so on this note, let's get started with our PowerShell scripting journey. So this is the official documentation made available by Microsoft where you get all the essential things to get started with PowerShell, I would request you to bookmark this page in your browser and visit it often whenever you need any help related to PowerShell. For now, what you have to do is go to this place, setup and installation. And depending on your operating system, click on one of these article and follow it to install PowerShell. If you are using Windows like me, then there are good chances that PowerShell is already there, but still by any chance if it is not there, you can follow this article. If it is Linux, go for it similarly for Mac and ARM, right? So it is a simple step. Please finish it quickly and then let's continue in the course. 2. PowerShell 02 Why Automation: Alright, I hope you were able to follow the article and install PowerShell in your system without much of difficulty. And if so, let's continue. So this is my system. Now, how can I launched powershell? Well, either you can simply go here and type PowerShell. So depending upon your system architecture, you might see 32-bit and 64-bit version of PowerShell, right? This is one way and another way could be, you can go to Run and you can type PowerShell over here. What is this IC will come to that, but for now, let's concentrate on PowerShell. So you can hit Enter and it will launch PowerShell. Right? Now, listen to this. Powershell is launched, but this is not launched as administrator. So in performing several administrative task, it will feel right, we will come to that when it will fail. But for now, let me tell you, if you want to open PowerShell in administrator mode, you can open it like this. So first go here, right-click, run as administrator. And you can easily verify from this title bar here, administrator is clearly written, right? So you don't see that over here. So this is the difference. So if you have launched your PowerShell as administrator on this particular system, it will not fail because of lack of permissions that is granted. Alright, so I'm staying in this regular PowerShell non administrative user. And now let's talk briefly about what we can do in this. So since you have decided to learn PowerShell, I will not tell you why you should learn PowerShell. What is PowerShell and all that, right? Because I'm sure you have at least a slight idea about that and more details about it. You can always explore from Microsoft documents. I don't want to make this series boring by including theory section into it. So it's only going to be live demonstration. Okay? Now what you can do with PowerShell. So in your system administrator's life, what various thing we do in general. So depending upon your role in your organization, sometimes you might be interested in Event Viewer, medulla services. Sometimes maybe you are interested in this desk space related things, right? There may be some application services which you want to restart on daily basis. Maybe some processes which takes higher memory or CPU, and you automatically have to kill and restart all those stuff like that, right? So for performing these various activities, all the time, you have to first login into that server and then perform those tasks. Now, what PowerShell enables you is instead of you do that task again and again in each server on daily basis, you scripted out. You make it nice readable PowerShell script, and just focus on doing this task correctly once. And then you and your team members can use the same PowerShell script again and again. By writing these PowerShell scripts, you are not just helping yourself, but also helping your team members in getting rid from this boring work. Honestly, I don't see any fun in logging into the server, see the memory utilization, and restart the service accordingly. There's hardly anything intelligent about that. Now, as I have a good experience of working in different organizations and different projects, I have sensed a genuine fear of automation among people's mind. So the fear of losing their jobs. So they have this fear in their mind that if I'm paid for doing the basic tasks, like cleaning up the disk space, restarting their services, performing basic task in Registry, tasks, scheduler, event viewer, etc. If I automate these using PowerShell, then my dependency is gone and I might lose my job. Well, this fear is then no doubts about it. But this is only applicable for those who choose not to learn. For those who continuously wants to learn and pick up new things, this fear is not applicable because work is going to be there for sure. Powershell is not something launched the day before yesterday, right? It is there for so long. And I do not see any scarcity of jobs created due to PowerShell, right? So you always have to keep yourself up to date and don't concentrate on those boring, repetitive task which are not adding any value to your life, right? It's not giving you any mental relief as well. It's just taking some time and making your life boring. Read. So I would say invest in your carrier, learn a new skill, and then you should be able to enjoy your work. Repetitive tasks certainly doesn't provide that. So just remember, nobody can stop an idea whose time has come. Alright, so this was a little bit of GAN from my side. Well, GAN is Hindi word for knowledge. Alright, my dear friend. I hope now you have your own reason why you should learn PowerShell and automate some of your boring and repetitive work on these naught. Let's end the lecture here, and let's continue to explore PowerShell in coming lectures. Thank you for watching. Take care. 3. PowerShell 03 Launch PowerShell as Admin and Non Admin and PowerShell Execution Policy: Hello friends, and welcome to another lecture of PowerShell learning series. Anybody can script. In this lecture, we will understand the concept of execution policy. And we'll also try to understand the significance of launching powershell normally, as well as an administrator mode. Yes. So without wasting any time, let's get started. I have seen many people getting struck at this first itself, which is you want to run some PowerShell script which you have downloaded from internet and you want to execute over here. Well, many people get stuck at this point itself. And I will tell you why. If you try to execute any script in your PowerShell, it has to be first allowed by your execution policy of this shell, right? And what is the current execution policy? You can execute this command, get hyphen execution. And I can press tab for the command completion. And you can see it has auto completed. And now I can hit Enter. And you can see my current policies restricted. That would mean I cannot execute my scripts in this PowerShell, right? Because the policy is not allowing that. Now, why would Microsoft keep this execution policy as restricted by default? Well, because your system is directly exposed to the internet. So it is very important that the hackers who somehow got access to your system at least should not be given administrator axis of this shell. Because if they have administrative access of the shell, then they can do pretty much anything, right? So for this reason, by default, it is restricted. But this is not applicable on your servers. Your Windows servers, which you keep inside your firewall, various antiviruses that running. And then you have different layers of security around that. Their power shells execution policy is not restricted by default. So let's try to change the execution policy now so that we are allowed to execute the script. So I will execute this command set because I'm setting something and then press hyphen. So this is, so this is verb hyphen and then noun has to come. So it is execution policy. This is how PowerShell commandlets are written. So verb, hyphen, noun, right? Sam giving space and then pressing Tab button to see what different options I have. So either I can give all signed means, all different scripts that are signed by a trusted certificate providers can be executed in this cell. Again, pressing Tab bypass will allow all different scripts to be executed. They are developed in this system or downloaded from internet. It will not differentiate on that default execution policy, remote signed execution policy. Basically, the scripts which are developed on this system can be executed directly, but if they are downloaded, there has to be signed descriptor, which is the default and current execution policy as well. So like this, there are certain execution policies defined. So if you want to know more about execution policy, if you want to know more about the execution policy, you can directly browse on internet or wait for some time. And let me show you how to get help about different PowerShell commandlets in PowerShell. Right? Now, let me set the execution policy to bypass and hit enter. Okay? And I'll say yes, hit Enter again. And oh, what is this? Access to? The registry key is not allowed. Well, what is this? It is asking to run the PowerShell as administrator. This is the same thing which we were talking about earlier. Right? Now you understand why we have to sometimes launched powershell as administrator. And some of the work we can directly do without even Administrator role, for example, PowerShell things. There's no harm in showing the execution policy. Current execution policy, right? There's no harm if the user gets to know that current execution policies restricted. So it allowed that command to execute, but set execution policy. You are trying to change the state of the system, which can make this system unprotected. And PowerShell didn't allow that. It said, first become administrators. I can think otherwise, go away, right, get lost. So let me launch PowerShell again in administrator mode this time. And there we go. So this time we are administrator, right? I'll keep this aside and let me execute this command, set execution policy. And I want to set as bypass, hit Enter plus y. Yes and yes. It's then get execution policy is set to bypass. Now. Now you are allowed to execute the different scripts on the system. How cool is that? So good execution policy has got this opportunity to be the first command lit, which we have explored in this series. How lucky is this command lit, isn't it? Now, let me tell you if you have two versions of PowerShell. Be sure in the version you have said this policy, you have to check, right? Don't set the execution policy in 64 bit version and expect it to be seen in 32-bit version rate. So this is depending upon which shell out of these two you are setting, it will reflect accordingly, right? Alright, let me close this now. Don't need admin session. So when it is not needed, when you are sure that for doing this task administrator is not needed, you should not launch an administrator mode. This is a very basic thing. You launch an administrator mode when you really need it, because it is very powerful by mistake, if you do something wrong, it will allow that. So that is the thing you have to be very careful if you come from Linux background, it is like pseudo, right? Line X. People need not to be told about linux pupil need not to be taught about pseudo. At least from my side. I am a dedicated Windows lover. Hardly have worked in line next. All right, my dear friends, I hope now you are clear on PowerShell execution policy, as well as you understand when to launch PowerShell normally and when to run it as an administrator. More details, of course, you can get from Microsoft documentation anytime, right? Well, that's it for this lecture. Thank you so much for watching. Take care. 4. PowerShell 04 Beginning with simple Commands and PowerShell Alias: Hello friends, and welcome to this lecture. I hope you are enjoying the scripting journey. If you have any feedback for me, please consider providing it to me so that I can accordingly at just my way of teaching. Yes. Alright. Now, without wasting any time, let's continue to explore PowerShell scripting. Yes. So for the comfort of your eyes, let me create this folder on the desktop itself. Now, I want to switch, basically, right now, my present working directory is this. But I want to come here. So first of all, I have to see what different directories are already available here. So by convention, I understand the Windows directory structure and I know there has to be folded inside this with the name desktop inside which I have created this. But I want to take a look at what different folders are available over here. So I'll do this ls. And I can see there are certain folders and desktop is here. So I want to change my directory to desktop first. Let's say cd Desktop. Hit Enter. And now again, I want to see the diet craze. And yes, I can see this partial folder over here. So I again do this CD, PowerShell, hit Enter, and I'm here now. Now what exactly we have done. So we were in this working directory and we switch to another one, right? Nothing great about it. But what I want you to notice is I have used ls command over here. Alice is not a Windows command as such. Again, Linux users might be aware of it, but this is not a Windows command. It says right in batch script also, if you write ls, it doesn't work because classically, DIR used to be the command, right? Then how come these ls command didn't throw any error and return the expected result. That is what I want you to think at the moment. Then CD. Cds also not a PowerShell command, right? But it worked without any problem, right? How is that working? And this is what we are going to learn right now. Powershell has this concept of LAS. So if there is some command late whose name is very long and you do not want to type this big name again and again, or for some reason, you are not comfortable with it. You can give your own name to that command lit and just call with that name. For example, we are doing over here like ls. So whenever you are calling this ls, it is calling some PowerShell commandlets, which is corresponding to this Ls. Now let's see what is that command lit. So I'll hit this gate Alias tab for auto-completion, hit Enter. And you can see this list of aliases. Now, depending on the different modules I have installed on the system, there could be a difference, but you can see this percentage is corresponding to for each object, this question mark for where object, and so on. So CD is corresponding to set location. So when I did this CD PowerShell, cd Desktop, actually I was calling set location. So set hyphen location is the PowerShell commandlets. But I never used it directly. I just use CD and eight core set location for me, this is called aliased mapping, right? So you can see they are more relatable aliases, right? So copy item C, P or copy you can use, or you use copy item itself. Alright, so these are some common aliases which are there in my system by default. And few came when I install PowerShell modules. But that's okay. So these are the aliases which I never created but came to me somehow with the PowerShell installation itself. But can I create my own aliases also? Well, definitely you can. Alright, now let's try to create our own LEAs and see if it works or no. So let's say this ls command is there, which is responsible for listing down the different files and folders, right? But I'm not comfortable with ls. I want to call it something else. Let's see how we can do that. So set hyphen alias. Options. Naming is nice, isn't it? Hyphen noun that is consistent across, which makes it very easy to remember. Right? Now. I want to call my ls command as list items. And I want to make it an alias of LS. Hit Enter. Now I'll execute this command. List my items. And you can see it is behaving as if it was there by default. But in reality, there's no such command as list items, right? Still returns the expected output. Why? Because let's see, get LES. And then what is the earliest, whose detail I'm looking for in this my items. Pass it. Hit Enter and you can see it is the alias name of good child item, right? But I never told it to make alias of gates item. I passed LS. Well, my friend because Alice is also doesn't have its own presence, analysts is also an alias of good child item only. So when you say you become alias of this, you are actually saying become the LES off gates. I'll item, right, this is the original PowerShell command lit. So this way, we have successfully created our own PowerShell commandlets, LEAs. And now I can keep on using this instead of using good child item. But is it fun in doing this? Can we do this all the time? A big nor, from my side, knowing a concept is good, but that doesn't necessarily mean we should implement it. Also, write the alias which you are creating are local to the system. If you make a PowerShell script using alias like list items, which we're not even there in PowerShell by default, you yourself created them. So using these, if you make a script, it will work fine in this system. And you will think that my script is great. But as soon as you send it to your friend and let him use it, it will fail in his system, right? Which will give you unnecessary pain of fixing it, right? So a good practices, always use PowerShell commandlets and don't create your own aliases, right? Alright, my dear friends, I hope you liked this concept of aliases. And also we explored two new commandlets, get alias and set alias, right? Let's continue to explore PowerShell more in detail in coming lectures. That's it for now. Thank you for watching. 5. PowerShell 05 ISE & PowerShell Console A Quick Walk Through: Hello there and welcome to this lecture. Let's have a quick walk through the PowerShell console. We open the console in the last lecture. So we need to go to Run and type PowerShell and hit Enter. Another way is simply searching by PowerShell in and start and hit the executable. So here we have our console. This console is mainly used for executing their scripts and one-liner commands. Basically, if you quickly want to get results from some remote machine or your own machine using a simple command, we can use this console. It is quite similar to our command prompt or CMD. It is not a great choice for development of a new script. You can customize it up to some extent from these property options. These options are self-explanatory and we need not to go into the details. Why are we seeing this console is not a great choice for development of script because you cannot add multiple line at a time. This console limiters to work in one line at a time, and that is not sufficient for writing a script. Second, we are not allowed to use Windows shortcuts like Control C and Control V for copy and paste. Also, within the line, we have to navigate using left and right key, which is irritating and slow down script making, right. Overall, it doesn't look great tool for development. So what is the solution then? It tastes smart, integrated development environment that comes along with PowerShell. And it is free of cost. Yes, I'm talking about Integrated Scripting Environment, commonly called as ISC. To open it, you can either type PowerShell underscore ISE in them, or again, give a simple search with ISE and click this executable, which will open up ISE. I highly encourage you to go through this beautiful looking GUA and try to understand it. I will quickly walk you through it. So this is your script pin where we will write our PowerShell statement. We can see the statements output in the console upon running. This console can also be used for trying new PowerShell command quickly. So what happens when we write a script at times, we are not sure about the syntax and want to try typing a command and check if it is correct or no. We can very well utilize this console for that purpose. Then we have these three important buttons. You can hold any button to see what it is meant for. This button is for running the whole script. Basically whatever commands you have written inside this is scripting area. It will execute all of them. But in case you don't want to execute all the commands, you can use this button to execute the selected statements only. And then we have this button to terminate the script execution. In case you want to open the console, no need to go to Run again. You can open console from here itself. Then we have this very interesting command button, which is meant for show command C and B letter PowerShell. When we just write a command, let's say get service for an example and select the command and click it. It will open up this. You're a form for us where we can just fill few of these details as per the requirement. And then we can either copy the command or simply executed. So we give inputs to a form and it creates partial statement for us. We'd need not to remember the parameters and syntax. How cool is that? In the right side, we are able to see this list of modules and it's command. You can think module as a function library which has set of functions defined inside it. And below this module, there is a list of functions defined in the selected module. When we select a command, it will also open up the GUI of show command dialog box. You can adjust your view as per your comfort using these buttons. I'm quite comfortable with this default view and don't want to change it. Alright, that's it. Now I leave up to you to cover these GUI more in detail. Please open your IAC and explore it. We will start using it from very next lecture. I'll see you there. 6. PowerShell 05 PowerShell Update Help: Hello friends, and welcome to this lecture. When you are dealing with any technology, there are chances that sometimes you get struck with some topic, concept, command, et cetera, right? So it is very important for us to know in the starting itself how we can obtain the help section provided by Microsoft itself for PowerShell so that we can understand the different concepts, commandlets, syntax, along with the examples without much trouble. So this lecture is dedicated to PowerShell. Help. Let's get started. Alright. So first of all, launched powershell. And eversion is fine where you want to update the health. And you can see your PowerShell window is there. Now, we need to execute this command late in order to update the update help. Now, what else you can ask for? How simple it is? Write update because you are going to update something and what is that we are going to update help? Simple. What I genuinely feel is you must admire Microsoft way of naming the command. Let you see update because you are going to take some action, right? It could be update, new set like that, right? Then hyphen. And what is that you want to update? Help, update, help work. Hyphen noun, easy to remember naming. I'm big fan of this naming style. To be honest, when we are executing this command, it will create different verbose messages if you want to see them. So you can pass this switch verbose. Also, you can pass this another switch force in order to force the excellence, right? And next is add an action. So I do not want to see any errors. So you can pass. Silently continue. What are other error actions available? Continue, ignore, inquire, silently continue. So by pressing Tab you can see all different interactions that are available out of which I am interested in. Silently continue, right? Let me hit the enter button and see what it does. We can expect the verbose messages. Yeah, so connection has been with all that going good. So basically what it is doing is reading some local configuration files and taking these URLs, going. They're downloading the help section and making it available for you to use in your local installation itself, right? You want to see what is this URL. Looks like Microsoft has hosted the different health related content on their Azure Cloud blob stories. And we are downloading it from there and updating our local help files, right? This is very essential step. Why? Because, you know, over the period of time, Microsoft developers are also updating their commandlets Related help section as and when they get bug reports and all that. So periodically, we should consider upgrading our help. Definitely, I'm not asking to do it every day. But once in two months is a good period of updating the help section, right? If you are very much interested, you can read the messages and see what all is going on. So these are the verbose messages which are coming because we passed were both over here. Had we not patched the switch, it will not have printed these messages, right? Looks like so much work it has done, right? We don't even realize what is going in the background. Alright, there we go. For me. It took around five minutes to complete this update. And now I'm relaxed because my help section is up to date. In case I have any trouble, I can visit it. Alright, so in this lecture, we understood how to update PowerShell. Help. Let's continue in the next lecture and explore how to make use of this help when we are in trouble. See you there. 7. PowerShell 06 PowerShell Update Help: Hello friends, and welcome to this lecture. When you are dealing with any technology, there are chances that sometimes you get struck with some topic, concept, command, et cetera, right? So it is very important for us to know in the starting itself how we can obtain the help section provided by Microsoft itself for PowerShell so that we can understand the different concepts, commandlets, syntax, along with the examples without much trouble. So this lecture is dedicated to PowerShell. Help. Let's get started. Alright. So first of all, launched powershell. And eversion is fine where you want to update the health. And you can see your PowerShell window is there. Now, we need to execute this command late in order to update the update help. Now, what else you can ask for? How simple it is? Write update because you are going to update something and what is that we are going to update help? Simple. What I genuinely feel is you must admire Microsoft way of naming the command. Let you see update because you are going to take some action, right? It could be update, new set like that, right? Then hyphen. And what is that you want to update? Help, update, help work. Hyphen noun, easy to remember naming. I'm big fan of this naming style. To be honest, when we are executing this command, it will create different verbose messages if you want to see them. So you can pass this switch verbose. Also, you can pass this another switch force in order to force the excellence, right? And next is add an action. So I do not want to see any errors. So you can pass. Silently continue. What are other error actions available? Continue, ignore, inquire, silently continue. So by pressing Tab you can see all different interactions that are available out of which I am interested in. Silently continue, right? Let me hit the enter button and see what it does. We can expect the verbose messages. Yeah, so connection has been with all that going good. So basically what it is doing is reading some local configuration files and taking these URLs, going. They're downloading the help section and making it available for you to use in your local installation itself, right? You want to see what is this URL. Looks like Microsoft has hosted the different health related content on their Azure Cloud blob stories. And we are downloading it from there and updating our local help files, right? This is very essential step. Why? Because, you know, over the period of time, Microsoft developers are also updating their commandlets Related help section as and when they get bug reports and all that. So periodically, we should consider upgrading our help. Definitely, I'm not asking to do it every day. But once in two months is a good period of updating the help section, right? If you are very much interested, you can read the messages and see what all is going on. So these are the verbose messages which are coming because we passed were both over here. Had we not patched the switch, it will not have printed these messages, right? Looks like so much work it has done, right? We don't even realize what is going in the background. Alright, there we go. For me. It took around five minutes to complete this update. And now I'm relaxed because my help section is up to date. In case I have any trouble, I can visit it. Alright, so in this lecture, we understood how to update PowerShell. Help. Let's continue in the next lecture and explore how to make use of this help when we are in trouble. See you there. 8. PowerShell 07 Performing Basic Operations Using PowerShell File and Folder Operations: Hello my dear friends and welcome to this lecture. In this lecture, we will explore how to perform basic operations related to files and folders using Windows PowerShell. So here we go. So at this location, I have opened my PowerShell ISE and switched to this rate. Now I want to create a folder over here using PowerShell. So let's see how to do that. Powershell commandlets for creating a folder is new item. Then you have to give the folder name. Or let's see what it has to say. Okay, it's asking for path. So if you want to specify an explicit path, you can do that or you can just say, this is my folder name. And then you have to go here. Powershell IntelliSense is helping me in figuring out the different options. I want item type. And then what is the item type I want? I'm pressing Tab, so file, directory, symbol link, link, junction. There are multiple options out of which I am interested in directory. That's it. I can hit Enter and go here, c, Check it out. Testing folder one is created successfully, right? Similarly, if I want to create another folder, but this time I want to specify explicit path like this. So VSS then another folder subfolder I want to create and then practice. So like this, I will specify a path and then I want to get it created, hit Enter and see. Another folder is created inside that. Another sub folder is their practice. So this entire directory structure gets created when you specify the path like this. So it was not existing earlier, but when we executed this command, it got created. This way, you can create the different folders. Now, what I want is I don't want this folder neither this one. So, alright, sorry, sorry, sorry what I'm doing. So this folder is created by mistake. I want to get rid of it. How can I delete a folder using PowerShell? So with the delete, what are different verbs coming in your mind? I'm not sure how to say this, but yeah, remove is one of the word which might be coming in your mind when you think of deleting something, right? So remove. And then what is that you want to remove item, right? Because for creating it was new item. So for deleting it has to be item on the right. So remove item. And then what is it you want to remove tasting folder one, right? Let's see. Hit Enter. And it's saying the item at user and recurs parameter was not specified. So basically it is asking because it recurs parameter is not specified. It is not sure whether to delete all the sub folders and sub, you know, the items inside this folder. So whether we want to delete or no, so we have to give so it is asking for confirmation. What I want is cancel this and this time I want to pass a recursive helping PowerShell understand that I have got nothing to do with the files and folders inside this folder. So you need not to prompt me and hit Enter. And you can see the folder is gone, right? So this is the beauty. Now, you are clear about new item and remove item. Yes. Now, let's see how to create a new file. So now you are aware how to create a folder and how to delete a folder. Let's proceed to get let's proceed to create a new file this time. So I'm clearing my screen, clear host instead. So new item and the file I want to specify is, let's say PowerShell. Exam file dot TXT. Then. Okay, item type is, let's it. In case you are wondering what is this name parameter. So basically, path is supposed to be that folder location in which you want to create the file. But if we specify this dot TXT and the complete name here itself, then powershell will understand that, okay? Okay, So with this name, you want me to create a file at the current location itself. So it automatically takes care of that. That is the reason we are not bothered to pass this name parameter separately. And I need not to repeat this again and again. You are already aware how to avail the help section about different commandlets of PowerShell. So if you want to understand all different parameters, what you have to do is use Get Help command lit, and pass this new item to it. And you can explore the details of this command late, right? So they're not to bother about it at the moment. Let me proceed. And you can see this file God created automatically. If we open this, of course, we cannot expect any tax to be written inside it, right? Because we never wrote. So how to write something into it? Well, there are simple ways. First one is, let's say you want to write this. This is my force. Let's say you can just put a pipe here and stay out five. Basically this is the command lit, which will pick this input and write into the file of your choice. So my file is this. Yes. Then what is that you want to do? So let's say you can specify encoding and all of these rate. So if the file is already open and you want to force the action, you can use this false parameter and all this. Now, let me execute this statement and see PowerShell, this is my first statement. Now, let me go here again and I want to write another statement. Let's see. So copy this, paste it here. This is not needed. This is my second statement. And I want to execute this. Go there again, open it. This is my second statement. Find my second statement is there, but I never asked PowerShell to remove the first one. Why the **** it is deleting it? This is not something we desired rate. What to do. So simple thing, it is first-time when we execute this, it will create this file. Even if it is there, it will make it empty, and then it will type this a second time. When you do this, it has to do its own job. It has to do it same job, which is make the file empty and then write the content. But your intention was different. You want it to retain that contained and then append at the end. So exactly what you might be thinking. So append is that switch that we have to pass in our file in order to retain the text of this file and only append our desired string at the end. So let me execute these two statements in one shot. Go to the file, open it and you can see this time, first, second, both statements are available inside our file, right? I hope you are liking this file operations. And I am sure more than just watching me doing this, if you will try it your own, you will like them even more. Yes. Okay. Another important thing, while writing to a file, if you wish to specify the encoding, then you have this switch called encoding, which you can use. And you know, out of this, out of this list, you can pick one. And let's say if you want ascii encoding, then you can use this, use it this way, and then you're encoding will be intact. So this you can use, and there are more parameters which you can make. Now, the next requirement is we want to delete this file. So for that, what we can do is remove item. And then the filename, power example, file.txt tab for auto-completion, hit Enter and you can see the file is gone. So this is the thing. Alright. Now, in this lecture till now, we created a folder using PowerShell, then deleted it, then we created a file rod content into it, and also learned how to delete a file. Let's continue in the next lecture where we will see how we can read a text file into PowerShell and make use of its text. See you there. Thank you. 9. PowerShell 08 PowerShell File Read Operations Using PowerShell: Hello friends, and welcome to another lecture. In this lecture, we want to read a text file into PowerShell and then make use of its content, right? So this is the file I have created five statements in total and line one, line two, like that, I have given a number to each new statement, saving it and closing this file. Now, I want to read this file rate. So first of all, living it and then, oh, okay. Okay, so for reading the file, the command ladies, get content and then we have to specify the path of file. So let's say this is my file, Sample dot TXT. Now execute the statement. And you can see we were successfully able to read that content or file into PowerShell Using get content command late. There are certain more parameters to this command lit, which you can make use according to your requirement. For example, how many lines you want to read, total count, if you want to start reading from the end or filter, include, exclude, etc. I highly recommend you to go through the help section and see what each of these parameters mean right? Now, this is statement helped us to read the file, but still the content we are not stored into any powershell variable rate. So we cannot play around with the text of this file directly unless we store into some variable, right? So for this, what we can do is copy this and make a variable file content equals. And this time, now if we execute this statement, you can see the file content. If I hit Enter, it has stored all of these file content into this variable rate. If I just show you the type of this variable. Because each of the entry. So this file content variable is of type and each of these lines is stored as in entity. So if you want to see the other file content, dot count. So it will tell you how many lines are there in your file, right? So there are total six lines. Hence it is telling you the count is six. Now, let's say you have requirement and you want only first-line. So you can specify like this. If you want second line only, you can specify it like this. So because this file contains variable is of type, all related operations are applicable to it, right? Alright. Now, next requirement is we want to read the text of this file and then only select those lines which satisfies our criteria, let's say. So for this, what you can do is we can use this commanded where object and then just follow your screen carefully. So curly braces, then dollar underscore. This represents your current object. So this file, we'll read the file line by line and each line as an object. In this right-hand side of this pipeline, where are where object command late is sitting and it is processing, and it is processing one-by-one. So this dollar underscore is representing the line which is currently in processing, basically first-line, then second line, like that, it will do. So. On top of this, we want to add our condition, which is like line for, let's say. So we want to read in this file and get the line which has this particular keyword. So let me hit Enter. And there you go. Where object has put this condition that the content of that particular line has to be line for somewhere. It could be in the end. It could mean they're starting, but it has to be there, then only it will return it, right? So this condition is applied and there is only one line which satisfies this condition. That is why only this line is seen in the output. Now, you might have a question, okay, here only there was one line, but what is more lines are there? Let's see right away why to live in a confusion. So this time I'm removing for this search criteria. Now these four letters line. So each of these lines are having their right. So we should expect all of the lines in output, right? So let me execute this time. We can see all of the lines because each of the line is satisfying this condition. So this way we can play around with the text stored inside the file or make use of it in a variety of ways. Now, last topic of this lecture, we used a variety of PowerShell commandlets in this lecture. Right? Now. If you want, now if we want to see each of those commandlets which we executed in this cell, there's a nice command called git history, which we can execute. This gate history command lit is very nice. It gives you the history of each command. Let this we executed in our shell in there starting with switch to that directory, then created a new folder, you know, deleted the folder, and then rod into a file. Each of these commandlets are saved in history. So pretty much if you want to script out, right, whatever we have done in this lecture, if that fulfills a requirement and you want to script it out, you can pretty much paste it like this. Get rid of these line numbers and your script is ready. You just have to save it as a dot PS1 file. And you got them, right. This way. History is very helpful. Alright, my dear friends, I hope you liked what you learned in this lecture. And if you did, please do let me know in your feedback. Thank you so much for watching. Take care. 10. PowerShell 09 PowerShell Modules Introduction & Benefits: I'm sure you are super-excited to write a lot of powershell scripts and automate all your boring and repetitive work. But hey, hold on. You need not to develop everything from scratch. There are good chances that the problem which you are about to solve using a PowerShell script may not be unique. You know, maybe it was faced by some other PowerShell script or in the past. And he or she has already written a script for that, right? So in that case, you do not have to write the script from scratch, but use the code of that person and customize on top of it. Just for your fine understanding, I'm giving you another example. You want to edit a photo and add effects in the background. For this, you do not write a software from scratch and then add those effects, right? Instead of doing that, you prefer to use an existing software called Adobe Photoshop, right? That perfectly makes sense. While Adobe Photoshop has everything inside it, but still, it is your creativity, how you use those features, right? So your intelligence or your creativity is still with you. Adobe Photoshop. It's just helping you in order to achieve your goals quickly. Correct? Something very similar can be done in PowerShell scripts by importing somebody's code inside our PowerShell script and speed up the development process so that you can automate more and write less, right? Let's get started. In. A module is a package that contains PowerShell members such as commandlets, providers, functions, etc. It basically allows you to combine multiple scripts to simplify code management, accessibility, and sharing. Okay? Alright, with this short introduction, now, it is time to do practical. So visit this site called PowerShell gallery.com. And as you can see, this PowerShell gallery is home to 70 thousand plus packages, right? So they are pretty good chances that whatever you are trying to automate, you will find some help related to that in this repository. In this list, you can see the packages which were downloaded in highest number in last six weeks. Let's take a look at this. So looks like networking, desired state configuration is quite popular. 6 million plus downloads here. Similarly, we can go through this list and see what is popular in PowerShell these days. Because these are the top downloaded models of PowerShell. Write. While going through a list. If you see something interesting, you can click on that particular package. For example, I really want to understand what is this carbon package which has got 946 thousand downloads already. So I'll click on this. Alright, so this has taken us to this dedicated page to carbon module. And we can understand little bit about it. Carbon is a partial model for automating the configuration Windows seven. Alright, so broadly, it is dealing with this stuff, right? Let say we are interested in few of these tasks and want to get our hands dirty on this module. So how to install it in our system? Very easy. Here you can see this Install module option and you need not to even write a command for this directly. Copy this, go to a PowerShell and paste it right now, can you see carbon in this list if it's not there? Right? So let me execute this particular statement in my PowerShell ISE and it failed. Why? Take a moment and think. Okay, it's pretty straightforward. It failed because my PowerShell ISE is running as a normal user and not as an administrator, right? So I'll just close this, relaunch PowerShell ISE as administrator. This time it is running as administrator. Paste. The command. And execute. If you do not want to see warning like this, you can pass force as a switch to this command lit yes to all. And so it is installing the package carbon completed. Let me refresh the list of modules and let me search for carbon. Yeah, there we go. We have got this module, carbon in our list of modules now, good job. This means all different commandlets, functions, aliases, variables, et cetera, defined inside this particular modules are now available to us, right? So this is what precisely install module does. Now, if you want to know where exactly your module is placed in your file system, because it is installed. So it must be having a physical location, right? For this, you can execute this statement and it will give you the list of locations where your modules can be placed. So let me try to see it's empty. So note here. Then second is here. And yeah, this is the location of my module, right? So this is what God downloaded with this. Pretty good. Yes. In most of the cases, this install more dual command lit will help you to download and install the package. But in rare cases where you need to use this module, but on that particular system, you are not allowed to use the Internet. Maybe your company policy or some other reason like that. So this command, it will not work there. In that case, what you can do is manually download this package on another system where you have Internet connectivity. So you need to follow these steps. So very simple steps. They are basically to download the package and GP and keep it at the location like this where other models are there. And then you can very well use your module inside your code, right? So it's highly recommended to use this install hyphen module commandlets. But in those cases where this option is not working, you can go for men will download method as well. Alright, going back to the main page of PowerShell gallery. So in this, starting in order to show some very popular modules, I took you to this list. But a better way of browsing this side is like this. So go to packages and it will take us to pay like this. Where firstly, we can search for the functionality that we need. Let say, I am looking for a PowerShell script or module which can help me to manage my IIS. So I'll go here and type IS search. Then we can use these filters. Let's say I'm not interested in script, but I need modules. So I can uncheck the script option. Then if I'm looking for PowerShell modules specifically designed for Windows operating system, I can check this. And let's say I don't mind filtering based on the categories. So here are my results. I can sort it by relevance, popularity, etc. Here we can see carbon is one more tool which we previously installed in our system and is helpful in managing IIS. Then IIS Manager is also there. And you can see who has published this module. It's bed Garrity. How many downloads has happened when it was last updated, et cetera. Right? So let's try to explore this carbon molecules slightly in more details and understand what different commandlets are there inside it for us, right? So I'll go here in the list of models, select carbon. And then, and then you will see all different commandlets which are defined inside it. Another way of checking what different commands are there inside your module is this GET command, and then specify the name of module four which you are searching. I'm interested in carbon module. Just execute this command mode and then execute this. And it will get us the list of all different commandlets defined inside this particular module, right? We install this module because it has few commandlets that can help me in managing IS. Let me search for IS and see what different commandlets add there. So they have added this C here because they want to differentiate from other commandlets and see here basically refers to carbon. So you can read this as get carbon IS application, right? That is what my assumption is. If you have any prior experience of IIS web server, you can find these options as very relevant that can help you in managing your IS better. Alright? All different modules that you can see here are already part of your session. This means you can use these modules inside your PowerShell script. But earlier, this was not the case. This feature is only provided starting with PowerShell version three. So just in case you are using some older version of PowerShell, you need to import a module in order to be able to use it. And for this import hyphen module command lit is your friend. So you just need to execute this. And if the model is available to you, it will be imported inside your current PowerShell session. And from there onwards you can make use of this module, right? All right, my dear friends, I hope now you understand what is a module, how to use PowerShell gallery to figure out the more tools that can help you. And then how to install the modules into your local PowerShell and make your life easy while writing powershell scripts. Well, that's it for this lecture. Take good care of yourself. Thank you. 11. PowerShell 10A System Process Management 01: When we use PowerShell for automating repetitive work, very frequently, we have to deal with systems, internal processes. So this is the right time to learn how to manage system processes using our good friend, PowerShell. We will spend a decent amount of time on this topic and you are going to love, it. Sounds exciting. Well, let's get started then. If you are a regular Windows operating system user, and I'm sure you are aware of this task manager. So when we go to the details section of this, we can see all different processes which are running in our system. Processes management is essentially listing down these processes, creating reports out of it, or fetching some essential details about the processes of our interests, stopping the processes, or at times creating new processes. We are going to learn all of these operations one by one. Before we get into PowerShell, I want to show you something very interesting. So by default, in this view, you can see only these many details, right? But there's something interesting. If you right-click on this and click on this select columns, you can see there's much more to display Then what is available in the default view. So you just have to check and then click, Okay, and these details who's also be start appearing in this view? For now, just keep a note of this. Alright, let's get started with managing system processes using PowerShell. First of all, let's try to create a new process and add to this list, right? So I'm just always on top here. Here it is. Okay? Yeah. So there's a command lit in PowerShell called Start process. And then I'm just typing. Can see this is a command for opening calculator. Let me execute this. And as soon as we have executed this statement, calculator application, which is running in our system, has opened. But where is the corresponding process in this? Let's try to figure it out later. Dot EXE, right? So this process is created over here. By default, this is start process command lit doesn't return any details. But if you just pass this pass through switch, then if we execute, it will not just create the process, but we'll also return some basic details about it, right? Hey, opening calculator is okay, but how to take benefit of this particular command lit? Well, let's take a look. So this is my present working directory. And I have kept a batch file at dislocation with simple one-line statement porch. Right? Now, I want to start this command lit from my PowerShell script, right? How to do that? Let's make use of our Start process command lit and do this. So start process, then file path is this sample dot bed. I'll just select this and nothing else if I was to. So as you might be aware, batches scripting was very popular automation tool for Windows systems. So at your work also, you might be having lot of automation scripts which are written in batch, right? So in your PowerShell, you might sometimes want to call those scripts. So you can do it this way. And if those scripts need any arguments to be passed at the runtime, you can do it using this argument list switch, right? I don't need it this time, so I'll just execute this statement. And you can see it was successfully able to execute sample dot bad script. And my positive statement is over here. I just need to press any button and it will go away, right? So this is how you can take benefit of start process command late in launching any application on your system. Let's take another example. So this is the location of my favorite media player, VLC, right? So I'll just launch process. Vlc, the file and lunch. And you can see VLC media player is successfully launched using PowerShell, right? With this, I hope the concept is very clear with you. Be it, another business application that you want to launch on your system or another script that needs to be triggered, or maybe your system's default application. All of these can be launched using start process commandlets, right? You can get more help about it using the command lit, get help, and then just pass the name of it with online. And particularly in the health section, I request you to go through the examples because this example will make you very clear on the concept. I'm sure you will definitely make use of help document available for this particular command lit. At this point of time, I request you to practice start process command lit by trying to launch a couple of applications running in your system. And once you do that, Let's meet in the next lecture to continue exploring systems process management using PowerShell. See you there. Take care. Thank you. 12. PowerShell 10B System Process Management 02: Hey there, welcome to this lecture. In my task manager, you can see so many processes are running. Each of these process is assigned some certain task and, you know, my system is behaving the way it should, essentially because of these processes, right? The agenda of this lecture is using PowerShell. List down the processes in which we are interested. For example, list down all the processes with the name Chrome dot EXE. Sometimes it could be leached down all the processes which are in suspended state, let's say. Or it could be leached down all the processes with peak working set memory higher than 35 thousand kilobytes. So there could be various parameters based on which we want to leech down the processes. So this is the main goal of this lecture. Once we have filtered out the required processes, we might want to take certain actions on them. It could be fetching more details about our processes. Sometimes we might want to create a report out of those processes. In this lecture, we are going to perform all of these operations. I hope you are excited. So without any further ado, let's get started. We have a command lit in PowerShell called gate hyphen process, which returns a point in time snapshot of systems running process information. Let me run this command lit without passing any arguments. If we just run it, you can see all different processes which are there in Task Manager. We are able to see TO here also. Now, what is this point in time? Well, good process commands. It returns all the processes which were available at the time of running. Immediately after 1 second. If more processes are added, this output doesn't get refreshed. This is the meaning of point in time snapshot. Here you can see this list is continuously getting updated. But this wouldn't be the case with output of a gate process command lit, right? I hope you are clear on this. Okay, Let's see further use cases of this. So using gate process command late, if we were to fetch all the processes with name grown dot EXE, we can do it like this. So just pass name and then automatically it is suggesting what different processes are there. I am interested in Chrome and let's execute this. And you can see all different processes with this particular name are listed down over here. If you have a different requirement where you want to list down all the processes, not by name but by their process ID. Even that can be done like this. So let's say you are interested in the process whose process IDs 10852. So I'll just write like this, run this. And you can see this particular process we are able to get, right. Let me clear my screen and I will launch another process called calculator, let's say. So essentially this we create a process in the Task Manager. Now, I need to catch the process responsible for running the calculator application, right? How I can do get processed. And then it's name is o calculator, right? So this way we are able to get a particular process. We are able to see these details over here, but I want to show you something more interesting. Do a Select Object and star. So we want to see all different properties available for this output. So let me run this. And you can see we didn't have these many details. Instead, we have so many details available for this particular process. So if you were to find the process working set memory pays memory size, all of these details are available to you, right? Moving on, you have already seen this particular output. So all different processes with process name as Chrome are listed over here. This output in console is not very user-friendly. I hope you agree with me. So what we can do to make it look better, I'll just put a pipe and out grid view, right? And now execute the command. And you can see it. New window has been created to us by PowerShell where we can filter, let's say. I want to seize process with ID five double 16. So I can just type it over here and automatically it will search and give that particular process. Or also I can add the filter criterias like this and just add them and then click these will be added. I can put values over here. So we can apply the filters like this. Not interested in a filter, we can just remove. This particular view is more comfortable for working on the output. I'm sure you are liking it more than this view. As we know, only these many details are not available for the processes, but we have so many details, right? So what to do to get all of this information in this particular view? So let's work on this. Just go and put here another pipe and write select star. So basically, now this will return us all different properties on the object. And we are piping it to out grid view in order to get output like this. Make sense. So let me close this and run this one. There we go. All different information is available to us in nice-looking view where we can work on the things, right? Okay, let me just make it clear. This out grid view is a nice command lit, which I, Anyways, wanted to show it to you. Okay, this don't get confused that it has got something to do with process management as such, there is no such relation. Okay? Alright, now, let's slightly make the requirement complicated. So let's say we want to leech down all the processes that starts with letter C. So very simple, it is get processed. And names should be starting with C. And then just, we can put a star as a wildcard so that it will search for all different processes whose first letter is C. Let me execute. And yes, there we go. All different processes, starting with CR here, right? Please notice in this view, we can see these many column headers from where it is coming. It is decided by PowerShell, right? I never specified that I want to see process ID, SIs, CPU, et cetera. Right? So what is happening here is these are the columns that user wants to see as output. But we can very easily override this. So let's say firstly, we want to see all different properties which are available for this object of gate process command lit. Here. Firstly, I want to see only one object and then all properties on that object. So I've just made this statement, let me execute. So instead of seeing these columns, which are decided by PowerShell, I want to choose what I want to see in my output, right? So let's say we want to see the name, company, working set handles and path in output. So we can prepare the statement like this, select object and just tell the properties which you want to see. Needless to say, you can only specify those properties which are available for your object, right? So let me execute this. Oops, why we are seeing the output as a list and not as a table, which we were seeing earlier. What has changed? Look, this is not a problem. Actually. What has happened, we can see so many details, right? Calculator Mike, in these details, this particular item called path looks like very long string, right? So what PowerShell is thinking, you user doesn't want to see such a long string in tabular way. So let me show S list. But in our case, we definitely want to see it in tabular manner only, right? So what we can do is force PowerShell to show this output table for this just right format table. And let's say for the columns, I want to auto size. So let me execute this statement. And this time output has come in tabular manner, right? Okay? And sometimes when it is coming as a table, but you want to see it as a list. What you can do is this type format list here and output will be shown as list. These are very basic concepts of PowerShell. I just want to show you so that you can learn by doing. If I was showing you this format list and format table 30, Kelly, you wouldn't have liked. This is my assumption. Okay, I hope you are very clear on this. Moving on. So on top of this output, let's complicate the requirement further so that we can understand one more command late. Okay? So I want to fetch all different processes that starts with C. And also whose companies? Google LLC, let's say this is the requirement. So how to deal with this? Well, very easy. Just put a pipe and use command lit, we're object. So now what will happen? All different processes that starts with C will be returned by this particular command lit. Then we have pipe, so objects will flow towards right-hand side. And there we have this where object command lit, which is there for us. And this will be used to filter down the objects, right? So dollar underscore, this indicates the current object which is coming from left hand side. And then I put dot and I want to filter by company. So let me put company here. And then I want it to be having Word google inside it. This looks good. Let me execute this. Okay. Well-done. So yeah, we have got all different processes which has Google as company name. Why? Why the company name is not displayed in the output? Because we never asked for it. If we want to say it, we just have to put it like this right? On another pipe and then like this and execute and definitely it will come correct. We're not interested in it. So let me remove this and clear my screen. And now I want to execute this again. Okay, let me complicate the requirement further. So this time we want to see all different processes. So this time we want to see all different processes running in my system, which starts with letter C, has company as Google and handles value should be higher than 500. This is the requirement. So what to do? Well, very easy. Just put this inside a bracket and use another condition and use an operator called and then another bracket. And inside this, we want to apply another filter called handles, whose values should be greater than 500, right? And let me execute this. And there we go. Looks like there are only two processes in this list which satisfies all three conditions, right? If I just show you all different properties available on this, I'll just write select star. And yeah, so far what we have learned in this lecture is how to fetch the processes and filter down the output based on our conditions. We learned this concept using two conditions. One company being Google, and another handles count is greater than 500. But you can apply so many more filters and just narrowed down the output to your requirement. Like working shirt should be higher than certain value or product version should be this like that. There could be so many more filters that you can apply and just get the output which you are looking for. Based on what you have learned in this lecture. It should not be a problem for you to solve this assignment. And once you complete this assignment, take it from me. You will feel yourself very confident in doing systems processes management using PowerShell. Now, it is time to move on to the last topic of this lecture. I'm using Chrome browser and there are so many processes created for it. I just want to stop all of the processes that are under name chrome dot EXE. How to do this? Very straightforward. So before even stopping the processes, firstly, I want to list them the processes. So get processed. Names should be Chrome, right? And this will list down the processes for me. I just have to put a pipe and pass it to another command lit called stop process. And let me execute this. And you can see all the processes with name, Chrome, argon, and the browser is also stopped. All right, my dear friend, I hope now you are clear on how to manage your system's internal processes using PowerShell. Well, that's it for this lecture. Take good care of yourself. Thank you. 13. PowerShell 11A Manage Windows Services using PowerShell 1: A Windows service is a computer program that runs in the background. It doesn't have any user interface. And it's similar in concept to a Unix daemon. Windows service can be started automatically or manually, and if not needed, they can be kept in the disabled state as well. Okay, fine. But why are we talking about Windows services in this lecture, which is supposed to be for learning PowerShell. Well, there are many operations involved in managing Windows services where PowerShell can help. Confused, let me explain. Windows services are designed to run all the time. Many times they start making the oral system slow due to memory issues. So to keep the system healthy, we should keep on restarting the services at some fixed reschedule. It could be once in a day, on alternate days, or even weekly restart is acceptable depending upon what kind of task your service is performing and how much load is there on it. Powershell can help you in automating this very frequently needed automation. Apart from this, PowerShell can be used to stop a service, start a service, changing the service user account or the startup type of a service, etc. One big advantage of using PowerShell for managing your services is that using PowerShell, you can not only very well managed services on your local system, but also on the remote systems. This means using a single line powershell statement. You can change the state of a service on hundreds of virtual machine. So PowerShell saves a lot of your time. I hope you are excited. Now, let's get started with learning how to use PowerShell to manage your Windows services. Alright, first of all, to launch the services application, either we can go to the Start menu and type services and click here, or we can go to the run and type services dot MSC, hit Enter. And this will launch this particular application. If you want to manage the services on this machine itself, that's fine because it is already showing is local. So you can very well proceed with your operation. But if you want to manage the services on a remote machine, you can connect to that computer from here and then perform your tasks. In this application, you can see hundreds of services are there which has been assigned some task which they are performing either all the time or whenever required. We can see there are many services which are in running state, and there are many others which are currently in stopped state, right? And if we double-click on any service or right-click and go to the properties. We can see these advanced options. Here. You can see some basic details about your service path to executable. And it's a startup type, which could be automatic, manual. Or if you're not planning to use the service in nearby future, you can even keep it in disabled mode. And here is your service status which is currently running. And if we want to, we can stop it by clicking this Stop button. If you go to log on, we can see the account using which this service is running. So right now it is running through a local system account. But if you want to change it, we can do it from here, right? If you have a domain user account or a local administrator account, you can just specify its username and password. And then this service will start running through that account. These are some basic operations which you want to perform on your Windows services. We have seen how to do this in the UI. It's time to learn how to perform these operations using our friend PowerShell for performing any action on any of the service running in my system. First of all, what I need is object of debt service. So let's start with PowerShell commandlets for getting the service objects. And as we already know, PowerShell, naming of command lit is very user-friendly. So it is a verb, hyphen noun because we are trying to get something. So verb is good. And what we are trying to get, It's a service. So get hyphen service is the command lit. You do not need much of efforts to remember such command lit names, right? Let me execute this command lit. And you can see it has listed down all different services running in our system. And you can even compare it with this particular output, right? Most of the times we are not interested in this output of all different services. Rather, we want to filter it down to get the objects for our required services. Right? So now let's see how to filter down this output to get only those service objects, which we need. If you want to get the service by its name, you can use name as a switch and just specify the name of service in which you are interested in. For example, I want the, for example, I want the object for this particular service. So just specify the name and execute. We have successfully fetched Windows Management Instrumentation service. In this way, straightforward VR able to see the status, name and display name of the service. But do we have any other detail about the service or no. For this, what we can do is just put a pipe and type select star and run this statement. And there we go. You can see apart from these three properties, we have more properties. Like can sit down is true, can pause and continue is true, and so on. Which can be utilized, right? If you want to get the service objects not by name but by wildcard, Let's say you want all the services that starts with VM. And then we have specified wildcard here. So it will get us all different services that are starting with VMI, right? And instead of these three, if you want to see more properties, you can specify like this. Instead of seeing this output in list format, if you want to see it in tabular format, you can always specify format, table and execute this statement. And you will see the output in tabular format. And if you put this command laid out grid view, you will get even better view of this. Make sense. Moving on, let's slightly increase the level of problem. So this time we want to get all different services which are in running state, as well as their startup type should be men. Well, right, So this is the requirement. Let's see how to frame the statement for this requirement. So we want all services which are in running state. So let's break the problem into two. First half of the problem is this, right? So for filtering the services like this, we can put where object command late over here, just after the pipe. And then braces. Here we have to put dollar underscore, which signifies the current object coming from output of good service command lit wire, this pipe, right? And in which property we are interested in, it is status. And what is the status we need? It is running status. So I'll say equal to. And then now we should verify if this statement is correct or no, right? So let me execute this. And yes, all different services which are in running status are being returned in this output. Correct? So let's move on to the second part of the requirement, which is the services startup type should be men well. So since there is an end in the requirement, we can very well put brackets over here and add another requirement. Here we will specify the second part of the requirement. And there is an operator in-between of these two, right? And second part of the requirement is start type. Should be men. Well, right? Yes, we have got the output, but since the startup type is not in default output, we need to put another pipe and then select it. So I won't name status of the service and start typing. Right, let me execute this. Yep. So the statement which we prepare is working perfectly fine and we are able to see the services which are in the running state, as well as their startup type is men will write. On a side note, we can keep on adding these pipe and use more PowerShell commandlets in order to continue working on a single statement. But due to this, if this statement becomes less readable for you, you can always break this statement like this. So wherever you have pipe, just press Enter. And now if you execute, you can see it continues to work, right? And now, last topic of this lecture, because I'm running my PowerShell statements on the same system where these services are running. I'd need not to specify the computer name always, right? But if I was to fetch these services from a remote machine, I can always specify the computer name like this. So in my case, localhost basically means my own system. And then when you execute a statement like this, PowerShell will fetch you this particular service from this particular computer. If we had provided some other server name within the domain, then PowerShell would have fetched this particular service from that remote machine. This is how we can use PowerShell for remotely managing the Windows Services. Alright, in this lecture, we learned that command lit called Gates service. I am sure you are clear on how to fetch the services that you need using the good service. Well, that's it for this lecture. Let's continue working on Service Management using PowerShell in the next lecture. See you there. Take care. 14. PowerShell 11B Manage Windows Services using PowerShell 2: Hi there. Welcome back. In the last lecture, we learned how to use good service command late or PowerShell to fetch the required services into PowerShell that we need. So we can fetch the services directly by the name or using the wildcard, as well as using other properties like the service status, or they start type, etc. Now, it is right time to explore how to take different actions, like stopping a running surveys or starting a service, or changing the service user account, etc. So let's get started. This is a print spooler service which is currently in the running state, and I want to stop it. So what we can do is simply put a pipe and place another PowerShell commandlets or stop service, right? And just execute this statement. Now, go here and refresh. And you can see the service is stopped, which was running earlier. Same can be verified in PowerShell also by running this statement. And you can see the services stop. Please notice my PowerShell is running as administrator. So if yours is not running, please relaunch your PowerShell in administrator mode. Now, we want to start the service again using PowerShell. For this. What we can do is use another command lit, call, start, service, and execute. Go here and refresh. And you can see the service is now in running state. So using these commandlets, stop service and start service, we can change the state of service. So if your print spooler service occasionally gets struck, you can always try this option of stopping the service and after a couple of seconds, you can start the service again. Please note there is another command lit called restart service, which you can use this. And if you execute this statement, it will automatically stop the service and then turn it back into running state. But from my experience, this is not good. You should rather go buy this. And if you want to put, put some sleep time of some ten seconds. So that first service gracefully stops, then wait for ten seconds, and then start again, right? Sometime, restart service doesn't behave correctly. This is from my experience. Moving on. Right now, the startup type of this service is automatic. This means whenever system reboots, the service automatically comes back in to running state. But if you want to change this behavior and you yourself want to manually start the service whenever the system reboots, you can change it using set service command lit. So if I just execute this statement and go here, refresh. You can see now the startup type is manual, right? You can use the set service for performing multiple actions in one go. So this time we are going to change the startup type back to automatic, as well as we are going to change the description from this to this new description. So if I just execute this command and go here and refresh, you can see, you can see now the startup type of service is automatic and its description is changed. Alright? Currently, this service is running through a local system account. Sometimes organizations have policies to follow and they want to run a particular service through a domain service account. So let's explore how to change the service user account. For changing the service user account, we can again use set service command lit only, but this is not available in PowerShell version five. Currently, you can only use it in PowerShell version seven. So for performing this action launched powershell seven, of course, we are changing the state of service, so I should launch it as administrator. In my case, I have already created this test user as a local user account in this system. In your case, if you want to run your service through a domain user account, you can type your account name over here, right? So I'll copy this line and go to my PowerShell seven. Paste it here. It's asking for the password. Let me pass it. Okay, now I'll execute this second line. So based. And now I'll go to my service, refresh. And you can see now the service account is set to test user. So the user account for this service is successfully changed to test user. Well-done. Now, as I told, this particular command of passing the credentials to set service itself doesn't work in PowerShell five. But for some reason, if you do not want to use PowerShell seven version at all, you can perform the same task in these two ways. In your current version of PowerShell itself. In first one, we are using sc dot EXE to change the user name for our service. And in the second method, we are making use of WMA. Alright, my dear friend, with this, I hope you are clear on concept of managing Windows services. Using PowerShell, I urge you to complete this assignment and test your knowledge. Well, that's it for this lecture. Take good care of yourself. Thank you. 15. PowerShell 11C Automation 1: Hello my dear friends and welcome to this lecture. As we understand, if we are dealing with hundreds of servers and there are certain Windows services that we want to restart periodically, then powershell is a great tool to explore, right? So in this lecture, I'm going to demonstrate to simple PowerShell scripts, which are immensely helpful in restarting your Windows services on scheduled basis. And the best part is you can use the same scrapes to restart services on various servers on ad hoc basis, right? I am sure you are excited to see how we are going to run a PowerShell script on a centralized terminal server. And from there, it is going to restart the Windows services on various servers remotely without having to login into those servers. So without wasting any time, let's get started. First of all, let me show you the different VMs that I have deployed in my Azure subscription. So I have deployed this terminal server. Then there are two App Service, app Service 0102, which I'm going to use for demonstration. So we are going to run our script on the terminal server. We will not logging into these two servers, but sitting here, we want to restart the services on these two servers. So this is a requirement, right? And now let's see how we can deal with this using PowerShell. To deal with this requirement, I have prepared two versions of script with very small changes, right? I'm going to explain everything line-by-line. So don't you worry at all. Everything is going to be crystal clear by the end of this lecture. Yes. Okay, so firstly, let's talk about this version, which is to deal with requirements in which we have fixed window services that needs to be restarted. But the liftoff server names is not fixed, right? We have created these servers dot INI file in which you can update your server names, right? So if a new server you want to include, just write its name in the new line. And automatically it will be now used by this script and it will restart certain Windows services on this server as well. So this is a simple concept. Now, let's go through the script. This is our base directory where script is kept. Then we are creating a log file variable. So that and because we have appended that date in this file name itself. So this way you can get one log file for each day. Right? Then we are having this command start transcript. This is very interesting command lit. So once we have specified this file, it is going to write all different log messages into this, right? So using this right output command late, whatever statements we have written, all of these will be visible inside this because of this start transcript commandlets. Right? Then here we are reading the list of servers. Servers wrote INI file is here. We are reading these INI config file. And then this area of servers will contain all these servers. Right? After this, we have Services least defined over here. So all different services that we want to restart, we can specify here in comma-separated manner, right? If very small change, which you can do if you have requirement of this sort. If you want to keep this list of services outside of this script, let's say the way we have specified different servers in an INI file, you can keep another services wrote INI file also. And you can read these services from that file. So benefit will be you will not have to come and edit this file for changing these services, right? So in this demonstration, we are going to restart these services on this set of servers, right? Of course, you need to replace these services with your application services. After this. What we are doing is using PowerShell commandlets, invoke command, and to compute a name we are passing or different servers in one shot. So if 100 servers are there, then also we are invoking our logic for restarting the services on a 100 servers in one time. And then the logic for restarting the services is written inside this script block, right? Let's take a look at this logic. So sleep time we have defined as 30 seconds then for this difference. Okay? So because these services we have defined in our local host bird, we are invoking the script on remote servers. This variable will not be automatically passed to this remote computer, right? So for this reason, we have to specify it like this. So this way, PowerShell, we'll know we're referencing to the local variable, but we want to use the value on a remote machine. Correct? So we are firstly fetching the initial status of the services. Correct. So we are interested in name status and P S computer name. Then we're invoking this stop service command lit, and we're just passing the list of services again. So we expect this will stop the services on all different computers. After that, we are giving this thirty-seconds sleep time so that it can stop all different services. And again, we're checking the status so that we can see if the services were actually stopped or not. Right? Then. Here I don't think this lifetime is needed. After this, we are invoking start service command late to start the services again, right? And before leaving the system, we are checking the final status, whether services came back to running state or no. So for this reason, we are collecting the final status. So this is the script block which will be executed on the remote machines. In the end, we are just to stopping that transcript and script ends here, right? So it is time to do the practical. Now, let me close this and we'll copy this code to our terminal server. Our code will lie here, but we will restart the services on these two remote machines from here, right? Alright, so our scripts are copied. Let me go here and launch PowerShell. And just, let's take a look at the servers list. So it has got two servers on which we want to restart our services. And which services we want to restart the services, right? So let's execute a script now. Hit Enter. So this is the initial status of services on different computers. This is 01 and this is epsilon 0 to now it is stopping the services. And remember, we have included some thirty-seconds sleep time. So because of this, you will see the delay. This is the time we are located for the services to go down gracefully. Right? And once the services are stopped, we have checked their status again. And on board the servers, you can see the services are stopped. Right now. It is starting their services. And then again, because for starting the services, it can take some time. So we are waiting for thirty-seconds. And now this is the final status. On server one. All the services are running on server to all of the services are running, which means the services were restarted gracefully without any issues on both the servers. Right? Let me close this. And here. Let's say somebody reports issue that on this server, this service is not stored, something like that. Let's say app server 0 to somebody reported issue. You can open this log file. So let's say you have been reported and issue for this server related to service restart. We can go to this log file and see. Okay, so services were running on the server, then they were stopped also. And then again came back in the running state. So no issues with the service restarts script. Correct. So this way we can make use of this transcript, right? Alright, so this was the first version of our script. Very easy. Just update your services in the servers file and the list of services in this variable, and you are done. Right? Let's meet in the next lecture and explore second version of our solution to this requirement. See you there. 16. PowerShell 11D Automation 2: Alright, let's take a look at this second version of R script and this time instead often ionized based configuration file, we have used XML configuration file. Let me show you our configuration file. Looks like this. Everything is inside this service re-start tags. Inside this, we have different server and service combinations. Visualize this. You have different combinations here and you can just add your servers like this. This tag excepts comma separated values. So you can add your all different servers by separating them with a coma. And the same goes for the service has also all different services that you want to restart should be added like this. What is the benefit of this approach is, let's say on this app server 01, you want to restart spooler service. Whereas on this second server, you want to restart spooler as well as this WP and service. Going by our previous logic, how you will deal with this requirement, right? But here you can deal with it very easily. In fact, all it takes is just update the values here and you are done right. Now. Here. Again, I have used absolute 0102 only because I do not have too many servers. But whatever your servers are there, you can update like this. This way. We can update our server service combinations and then we have to execute R script. So let me copy this code. Okay? And perhaps you are already aware we should try opening XML file like this. And if they open like this, we are sure that there's no syntax mistake inside the XML file, right? So now let's talk about this script. What is there inside it? Pretty much the same thing. It says that here, instead of reading the INI file, we're reading XML file and we're reading all different servers service combinations. So let me execute this script for you. So your XML content looks like this. Then if we go inside this and get grabbed servers, we get all different server service combinations. And inside this, inside this, we have our servers and corresponding services that we want to re-start, right? So one by one, we are reading these combinations, splitting these values by coma and storing them inside these variables. And from here, we are repeating exactly the same logic which we already discussed for the version one, right? So let me clear everything. Screen, what is the average? Let's execute our script. So I launched powershell and automation. Automation for plants service restart version to hit Enter. You can see this log file is created, which is storing our messages. And here, firstly, pick those servers, spooler services getting restarted on epsilon 0102, it's coming up. Okay. That's it. So all different services or re-started as per our requirement. And we can take a look at this log file to understand what exactly happened and what this mean to us is script is doing the expected job, right? So definitely this automation is a success, correct? Now, you do not want to come to this PowerShell and execute this script every day, four o'clock in the morning, right? So what you can do is say dual, this is script and tasks, a jeweler. And then this task scheduler will take care of executing your PowerShell script as per your defined schedule, as per your requirement. Alright, my dear friends, I hope both versions of this land service restarts scraped are clear with you. So we had this simple problem of plants surveys restart and we figured out to unique solutions which takes care of this requirement where you will write more than anything else. This approach that you know, what kind of configuration file will be the best suitable for requirement, and then how you should design your PowerShell script. If you are learning this, that is the most important thing. Rest, everything else is secondary. I'm sure you are already planning to use this script at your work for restarting couple of your application services. On this note, let's conclude this lecture. Take good care of yourself. Thank you.