I was working on a project the other day where I had to call a program from within Windows Powershell. This particular program needed command-line arguments and an input file when it was called. I wasn’t sure about the syntax of doing this in Powershell. After some Googling, I found the answer on the Microsoft Channel 9 Forums. The details are below.

-If you want to call a long filename in your Powershell script, the line looks similar to the one below (all on one line).
&'C:\Path\To\Your\Program.exe' -argument1 -argument2 'C:\Path\To\Your\Inputfile.txt'

That’s it! Once I got the proper syntax, my Powershell script ran my external program beautifully. Happy Coding!

Technorati Tags: Windows, Powershell, Programming, Scripting

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In a particular Powershell project I was working on, I needed to “Send an email using Windows Powershell.” I figured out how to do that, so the next trick was formatting the body of the email to look like more than just one long sentence.

In VBScript you would do this with VBcrlf (carriage return, line feed) and non-breaking spaces until you were satisfied with the text formatting. I was looking for something similar in Windows Powershell until I discovered that Powershell offers a more elegant solution. I found a little gem called a “here-string” at the Technet Script Center. The summary of this feature is below.

A “here-string” is basically a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text string that you can assign to a variable. You begin the string by initiating it like the example below.
$MyVariable = @"

Now anything following this will be formatted like you type it. For example:

$MyVariable = @"
"I will be formatted with
odd
line
breaks
without
a single
line of line-break
code!
"
"@

As you can see you end the “here-string” like so:
"@
on a line by itself.

So what will the output of this variable be? Anything in between the top and bottom of the “here-string” block will be formatted as you typed it. See below:
"I will be formatted with
odd
line
breaks
without
a single
line of line-break
code!
"

It’s magic! The more I use Powershell, the more I love it! It’s efficient and elegant. A potent combination. Happy Coding!

Technorati Tags: Windows, Powershell, Programming, Scripting

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Google Query: send email with powershell

In a previous post, I showed you how you can schedule a Powershell script. In this post I show you how to use Powershell to send an email. Thanks to Otto Helweg for the inspiration. This might be useful if you would like an email sent confirming that a script ran successfully.

This can be accomplished by using the Net.Mail.SmtpClient object. The syntax of the Powershell code needed is below:

$emailFrom = "user@yourdomain.com"
$emailTo = "user@yourdomain.com"
$subject = "your subject"
$body = "your body"
$smtpServer = "your smtp server"
$smtp = new-object Net.Mail.SmtpClient($smtpServer)
$smtp.Send($emailFrom, $emailTo, $subject, $body)

That’s it. Put this code (filling in your appropriate information) at the end of your Powershell script to send an email after the rest of the script finishes processing. If you use this code snippet in any of your projects please feel free to let me know in the comments.

Happy Coding!

Technorati Tags: Windows, Powershell, Scripting, Programming

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Google Query: schedule a powershell script

I was recently working on a project where I needed to schedule a Windows Powershell script to run. After some searching, I came across a post that lead me in the right direction at Mutable.net. Here is how you can schedule a Windows Powershell Script:

The first thing you need to do is make sure that Powershell is set to execute Powershell scripts, instead of only allowing interactive commands to be run in the Powershell environment.

Type the following at the Powershell command prompt: