Your favorite/usefull powershell scripts [closed]

Question

Along the same lines of the question about autohotkey scripts: http://superuser.com/questions/7271/, just now it's about Powershell.

Any usefull, handy or powefull scripts. Please describe what they do. Feel free to include scripts that don't have anything to do with server jobs or sysadmin tasks.

For example:

This command will recursively move your *.jpg images into the current directory, and add the originally containing directory name as a prefix for the image file.

(ls -r -include *.jpg) | % { mv -literal $_ $_.Name.Insert(0, [String]::Format("{0} - ", $_.Directory.Name))}

Or something you can run on text documents:

$badString = "This        is         not        the way   it   should     be."
$badString #for debug only
while ($badString.Contains("  ")){
    $badString = $badString -replace "  "," "
    }
$badString #tada

Because Powershell is the future.

Answer 1

Get-RecentUpdates.ps1, this will list the recent (default: last 7 days) updates from Microsoft Update (it is somewhat work in progress, some of the formatting should be moved to a .xmlps1 format definition):

#requires -Version 2.0
# Copyright Richard J Cox 2009. Use freely at your own risk

param([switch]$RawDisplay,
      [DateTime]$After = $([datetime]::Today.AddDays(-7)),
      [string]$Computer = '')

$extraArgs = @{}
if ($Computer.Length -gt 0) {
    $extraArgs.Computer = $Computer
}

$events = get-eventlog -After $after -logname system -InstanceId 19 -source "Microsoft-Windows-WindowsUpdateClient" @extraArgs | 
          select-Object -property EventId, Index, Source, TimeGenerated,
                        @{n='Message';e={$_.ReplacementStrings | Select-Object -first 1}}


if ($rawDisplay) {
    $events
} else {
    $events | ft -a -wrap Index, TimeGenerated, Message
}

Answer 2

My favourite from here... gets the Windows serial key in its real form!..

function Get-WindowsKey {
    ## function to retrieve the Windows Product Key from any PC
    ## by Jakob Bindslet (jakob@bindslet.dk)
    param ($targets = ".")
    $hklm = 2147483650
    $regPath = "Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion"
    $regValue = "DigitalProductId"
    Foreach ($target in $targets) {
        $productKey = $null
        $win32os = $null
        $wmi = [WMIClass]"\\$target\root\default:stdRegProv"
        $data = $wmi.GetBinaryValue($hklm,$regPath,$regValue)
        $binArray = ($data.uValue)[52..66]
        $charsArray = "B","C","D","F","G","H","J","K","M","P","Q","R","T","V","W","X","Y","2","3","4","6","7","8","9"
        ## decrypt base24 encoded binary data
        For ($i = 24; $i -ge 0; $i--) {
            $k = 0
            For ($j = 14; $j -ge 0; $j--) {
                $k = $k * 256 -bxor $binArray[$j]
                $binArray[$j] = [math]::truncate($k / 24)
                $k = $k % 24
            }
            $productKey = $charsArray[$k] + $productKey
            If (($i % 5 -eq 0) -and ($i -ne 0)) {
                $productKey = "-" + $productKey
            }
        }
        $win32os = Get-WmiObject Win32_OperatingSystem -computer $target
        $obj = New-Object Object
        $obj | Add-Member Noteproperty Computer -value $target
        $obj | Add-Member Noteproperty Caption -value $win32os.Caption
        $obj | Add-Member Noteproperty CSDVersion -value $win32os.CSDVersion
        $obj | Add-Member Noteproperty OSArch -value $win32os.OSArchitecture
        $obj | Add-Member Noteproperty BuildNumber -value $win32os.BuildNumber
        $obj | Add-Member Noteproperty RegisteredTo -value $win32os.RegisteredUser
        $obj | Add-Member Noteproperty ProductID -value $win32os.SerialNumber
        $obj | Add-Member Noteproperty ProductKey -value $productkey
        $obj
    }
}

Then use -

Get-WindowsKey

or even -

Get-WindowsKey "pc1", "pc2", "server999", "server777"

Answer 3

My profile script - sources a shared directory with a bunch of useful scripts:

$SharedScripts = '\\FileServer\Share\PowerShell\Scripts' 
Get-ChildItem "$SharedScripts\*.ps1" | % {  
  . $_ 
  Write-Host ('Loaded shared library: ' + [System.IO.Path]::GetFileNameWithoutExtension($_)) 
}