pshell.info

PowerShell Community Extensions 1.1 have been released. Just go to CodePlex and download the new version. To upgrade to the new version, first uninstall the old version. The new version also installs perfectly on Windows Vista.

There are many new cmdlets and features in this version. To find out more, just type man about_pscx. The first thing you will notice is that the man alias actually is mapped to a Get-PagedHelp script (a ps1 file). That one actually lets you view help using the less function which provides an experience similar to the less utility in Unix/Linux. It is better than the default paging because you can use HOME, END, PGUP, PGDN and many other things (just type H while you are using less).

Some of the new features:

• Set the variable $PscxFileSizeInUnitsPreference to $true (in your profile) to see file sizes in B,KB,MB,GB. Like the human readable flag in some Unix/Linux commands.
• Get-ADObject cmdlet: search for objects in AD or the global catalog and get some of their properties.
• Get-DomainController: get the domain controllers for a domain
• Write-Zip: cool cmdlet to create zip archives. Very powerful when combined with the filtering capabilities of PowerShell. Also check out Write-GZip, Write-BZip2, Write-Tar.
• Get-TerminalSession and Stop-TerminalSession
• Get-Privilege and Set-Privilege: get and set privileges like SeShutDownPrivilege etc…
• Resolve-Host and Ping-Host to resolve and ping hosts
• Get-Random to get a random number
• Get-FileVersionInfo: use it like “dir c:\windows\*.exe” | gfvi” to see the product version and file version of those files.
• Add-PathVariable
• Get-DiskUsage

They have also added a DirectoryServices provider to navigate Active Directory as a PSDrive. If you use the command GET-PSPROVIDER, you will see it in the list with your domain as a drive. You can then just use CD <YOURDOMAIN>:. See an example below of a DIR command at the root of my test domain:

Lots of interesting stuff in this release so check it out!