PowerShell Web





Generate a GUID

Here’s a small but very useful PowerShell script to generate GUIDs in different formats.


Monitor text files with PowerShell

You can use this method with PowerShell as alternative to the tail command at Linux.


Visualize data in PowerShell as GridView.

When using PowerShell, did you ever wish to have a function to pipe structured data to visualize it.

PowerShell has a great built-in function for that: Out-GridView.
You can even filter the rows in the grid.


Waiting in PowerShell for an action to complete

If you want PowerShell to wait for an action to complete, you can display a loading spinner using these few lines of code.

The script will print a new dot every three seconds until the condition in the until-clause is fulfilled.

The result looks like this:


Pipe output to clipboard

You can use the command line program clip to pipe the output of a command to your clipboard.

Write-Output "Hello World!" | clip

Grep on Windows – Searching in all files recursively

There’s no command line tool on Windows like Grep on Linux to search for a specific text in all files recursively. But there’s a simple alternative.


grep -r "peter" *


ls * -r | sls "peter"

Alternative for Invoke-SqlCmd

Invoke-SqlCmd ist a great cmdlet for PowerShell for querying SQL databases. But sometimes you don’t want to install the extra requirement SQL Server Management Objects on the server.

Invoke-SqlCmd -ServerInstance $Server -Database $Database -Query "SELECT * FROM Staff"

There’s an simple alternative. Use the .NET classes in the System.Data.SqlClient namespace which are available on every computer which has the .NET framework installed.

function SqlQuery($server, $database, $query)
 $connection = New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection
 $connection.ConnectionString = "Server=$server;Database=$database;Integrated Security=True;"
 $command = $connection.CreateCommand()
 $command.CommandText = $query
 $result = $command.ExecuteReader()
 $table = new-object “System.Data.DataTable”
 return $table

SqlQuery $Server $Database "SELECT * FROM Staff"