PowerShell

To see all the services on your system, use the Get-Service cmdlet:

Get-Service

This outputs a list showing:

• Name: The internal service name.
• DisplayName: A user-friendly name.
• Status: Indicates whether the service is running, stopped, or paused.

This command helps you get an overview of all services and their current state.

PowerShell is a powerful tool for managing system services, offering flexibility and control through straightforward commands. This guide covers the essentials of listing, searching, and managing services.

You often need administrative privileges to manage services. Running PowerShell as an administrator ensures you have the necessary permissions to start, stop, or modify services.

Steps:

1. Right-click the PowerShell icon.
2. Select Run as Administrator.
3. Confirm the User Account Control (UAC) prompt, if it appears.

In PowerShell, you can show elapsed time using a simple timer script. Start by capturing the current time when your script begins with $StartTime = $(Get-Date). Then, calculate the elapsed time by subtracting the start time from the current time: $elapsedTime = $(Get-Date) - $StartTime. Format the elapsed time into hours, minutes, and seconds using the "{0:HH:mm:ss}" format and apply it to a DateTime object: $totalTime = "{0:HH:mm:ss}" -f ([datetime]$elapsedTime.Ticks). 

$StartTime = $(Get-Date)
# Your script here
$elapsedTime = $(Get-Date) - $StartTime
$totalTime = "{0:HH:mm:ss}" -f ([datetime]$elapsedTime.Ticks)
Write-Host "Total elapsed time: $totalTime"

For more details and discussions, you can refer to this Stack Overflow post.

The Invoke-WebRequest PowerShell cmdlet is used to fetch content from a web page on the internet. It allows you to make HTTP requests, retrieve HTML content, and interact with web APIs directly from your PowerShell script.

Gets content from a web page on the internet.

# Here we are asking Google about PowerShell and saving the response
$Response = Invoke-WebRequest -URI https://www.google.com/search?q=powershell

# We use the Content property of $Response to access the webpage content
$Response.Content

In the example above, $Response will store the content retrieved from the specified URL (https://www.google.com/search?q=powershell). You can then use $Response to parse and extract information from the web page as needed.

To learn more about Invoke-WebRequest, you can visit the Microsoft documentation page. This resource provides detailed information and examples to help you understand and use this cmdlet effectively.

Join-Path is a PowerShell cmdlet that combines a base path and a child path into a single one. This is useful for constructing file or directory paths dynamically. The syntax for using Join-Path is:

Join-Path -Path <base path> -ChildPath <child path>

Here's an example of using Join-Path to create a file path:

$directory = "C:\MyFolder"
$filename = "example"
$path = Join-Path -Path $directory -ChildPath "$($filename).txt"

In this example, $directory is the base path, $filename is the child path, and "$($filename).txt" is the desired file extension. Join-Path combines these to create the full file path, which would be "C:\MyFolder\example.txt".

Using the *-Content cmdlets. There are four *-Content cmdlets:

• Add-Content – appends content to a file.
• Clear-Content – removes all content of a file.
• Get-Content – retrieves the content of a file.
• Set-Content – writes new content which replaces the content in a file.

The two cmdlets you use to send command or script output to a file are Set-Content and Add-Content. Both cmdlets convert the objects you pass in the pipeline to strings and then output these strings to the specified file. A very important point here – if you pass either cmdlet a non-string object, these cmdlets use each object’s ToString() method to convert the object to a string before outputting it to the file.

See more at How to send output to a file - PowerShell Community (microsoft.com)

To construct an array of objects in PowerShell, each item within the array is inherently treated as an object. Unlike conventional arrays that may consist of strings or integers, PowerShell arrays primarily contain objects. Below is a structured example demonstrating the creation of an array comprising objects through explicit declaration:

$people = @(
    [PSCustomObject]@{Name='John'; Age=26},
    [PSCustomObject]@{Name='Jane'; Age=22}
)

In this illustration, $people is an array variable containing two objects. Each object is defined using the [PSCustomObject] syntax followed by property-value pairs enclosed within curly braces {}. This structured approach ensures clarity and ease of comprehension while creating arrays of objects in PowerShell.

When working with custom objects in PowerShell, initializing an array of such objects might initially seem daunting. However, it's a straightforward process once you understand the syntax.

To initialize an array of custom objects, you can use the @() syntax in conjunction with @{} for each object within the array.

Here's a breakdown of the syntax:

$groups = @(
    @{ Name = "First"; Property1 = Value1; Property2 = Value2 },
    @{ Name = "Second"; Property1 = Value3; Property2 = Value4 },
    # Add more objects as needed
)

In the above example:

• $groups is the variable storing the array of custom objects.
• @() encapsulates the array.
• @{} defines each custom object within the array.
• Inside each @{}, you specify the properties and their respective values for each custom object.

For instance, Name, Property1, and Property2 are properties of the custom objects, and you assign values to them accordingly.

By following this syntax, you can easily initialize an array of custom objects in PowerShell, making your scripts more efficient and readable.