Cmdlet clashes
One of the things that struck me whilst developing Grrr as a snapin is: what do you do when you have a cmdlet with the same verb-noun pair as an existing cmdlet? If someone else had a cmdlet called, say, out-banner, and that cmdlet was already loaded in a snap-in…
Running pipelines in the background
In the unix world, we’re used to being able to run the different commands in a pipeline in different threads/processes. This is usually a lot more efficient when the producer/consumer rates vary, and makes use of multiple cores/cpus. For example, cmd1 | cmd2 will run the two commands in separate…
Alternate Data Streams
NTFS has the ability to associate multiple data streams (aka forks) to a file. It’s not very well supported in most Microsoft tools and not very well known, but I use them quite a bit for associating metadata with files. Unfortunately, PowerShell (or rather .NET) doesn’t support them very well.
Text and path gotchas
PowerShell is now my default Windows shell, but every now and then, little things crop up that make me want to go back to CMD.exe, or better cygwin/zsh. Someone gave me an example of filtering an ASCII text file, stripping out the first 3 characters of each line. On a…
Minor gripes
A number of little things bother me about PowerShell, and I’d just like to outline them here. Adding to arrays According to get-help about_array : “You can append an element to an existing array by using the += operator. When the operator is used on the array itself, it appends…
PNG and Internet Explorer
Oh dear, it seems that even though this is 2007, the most popular web browser on the planet (IE Will change it over to olde worlde JPEGs later, but in the mean time, if you’re using Windows, do yourself a favour and install Firefox or IE7. Update: I’m not entirely…
PowerShell is slow
I was going to start the new year with a positive note, but then I thought, lets get a PS1 pet hate out of the way first. PowerShell is slow. There are many ways to demonstrate this, but for this case I’m going to use a small snippet of code…