Arul Kumaravel

Windows PowerShell Development Manager

Microsoft Corporation.

Hey, PowerShell! I have a script that does certain management tasks based on the day of the week. I know how get the date in a script, but how can I tell whether it’s a Monday or a Tuesday or whatever?

This is very easy to do with Syste.Datetime class.

param ([system.datetime]$date = $([system.datetime]::now))

$dayofweek = $date.DayOfWeek

$intday = [int] $date.DayOfWeek

Write-Output "The day of given date is $dayofweek  and numerical value of day is $intday"

Let's see how this script works  The script begins by assigning the date from commandline or current date  to a variable named $date.

Next we use the DayofWeek  property to determine the day of the week for given date  DayofWeek is going to return one of the following value .  This is [System.DayOfWeek]  enum class values.

0      Sunday

1      Monday

2      Tuesday

3     Wednesday

4     Thursday

5      Friday

6      Saturday

if you want the numerical value of this enum, you can convert it to integer by using the [int] type converter.

Hey, Powershell! Given a date, can a script tell me the date that the Friday for that week occurs?

 Here’s a script that – given a date – will report back the date that the Friday of that week falls on:

param ([system.datetime]$date = $([system.datetime]::now))

$intday = [int] $date.DayOfWeek

$intadder =  5 - $intday

$dateFriday = $date.AddDays( $intadder)

Write-Output "The friday of the given date is  $dateFriday"

Let's see how this script works  The script begins by assigning the date from commandline or current date  to a variable named $date.

Next we use the DayofWeek  property to determine the day of the week for given date  DayofWeek is going to return one of the following value

0      Sunday

1      Monday

2      Tuesday

3     Wednesday

4     Thursday

5      Friday

6      Saturday

This gives us a value representing the day of the week; What we need to do now is programmatically determine the number of days between this date and the Friday of that week. That’s something we can do with a single line of code:

$intadder = 5 - $intDay

Confused? Don’t be; this actually makes sense. If you refer to the table you’ll see that Friday has a value of 5. If we take the value for Friday (5) and subtract the value for  given date we will get the days to add to get Friday.  That’s what we do with this line of code:

$dateFriday = $date.AddDays($intddder)

System.DateTime is a powerful class that allows you to do date manipulation very easily in PowerShell

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Arul Kumaravel

Development Manager

Windows PowerShell

Hey, PowerShell! Given a specific date, how can I determine the beginning and ending date of the previous month? In other words, given 8/11/2005, I need to get back 7/1/2005 and 7/31/2005.

Powershell provides access to .Net framework.  We can use .Net framework  DateTime class to solve the problem.  Let's write a script to solve this.

First, we need to get the date for which we need to determine the beginning and ending date of previous month. We can do this using PowerShell Param statement

Param ([System.Datetime] $date = $(get-date))

In the above statement, we are declaring a parameter of type Syste.DateTime.  We are also initializing it to current date when no parameter is specified.  It works as follows.  Let's say that we have saved the above as script file  BeginEndPrevMonth.ps1 then

.\BeginEndPrevMonth.ps1  11/18/2006

will set the $date variable to  11/18/2006.  However, if you don't specify the parameter like

.\BeginEndPrevMonth.ps1

then PowerShell parser will execute the  $(get-date)  which will get you the current date and time and this value gets assigned to $date.

Let's move on.  Now that we have a date,  we need to find the beginning and endind date of the previous month of this date.  Let's start the end date.  if I have a date like  8/11/2005,  then I find out the last date of previous month by subtracting the number of days in the current date.  In the example, if I subtract 11 then I will get 7/31/2005.  We can accomplish this in the script as follows

First,  determine the number of days in given date

$numdays = $date.Day

Once we have determined the number days,  we need to subtract this from the current date to get the last date of previous month.  There is no subract method available in  Datetime class. however, there is a AddDays method.  We can use this method to subtract days by passing in a  negative value to add. 

$prevmonthlastday = $date.AddDays(- $numdays)

We are calling  AddDays method in DateTime with  - $numdays to subtract the number of days.  We use the similar logic to subtract the number of days from  $prevmonthlastday to determine that last day of previou to previous month and then add 1 day to get the first date.

 

$numdays = $prevmonthlastday.Day
$prevmonthfirstday = $prevmonthlastday.AddDays( -$numdays + 1)

The full script is  as follows

 

Param ([system.Datetime] $date = $(get-date))

Write-Output $("The selected date is {0}" -f $date )

$numdays = $date.Day

$prevmonthlastday = $date.AddDays(-$numdays)

Write-Output $("Last date of previous month of given date is {0}" -f $prevmonthlastday )

$numdays = $prevmonthlastday.Day
$prevmonthfirstday = $prevmonthlastday.AddDays( -$numdays + 1)

Write-Output $("First date of previous month of given date is {0}" -f $prevmonthfirstday)

There you go ,  a script to determine beginning and ending date of previous month of a given date.

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Arul Kumaravel

Development Manager

Windows PowerShell

]]> https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/arulk/transcript-of-solving-management-problems-with-windows-powershell Sun, 19 Nov 2006 16:34:00 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/arulk/2006/11/19/transcript-of-solving-management-problems-with-windows-powershell/ Along with Jeffrey, I presented Solving Management Problems with Windows PowerShell session at TechEd Barcelona.   Many people asked for the script examples  I used during the presentation. Attached zip file contains transcript as well as input files used during presentation.

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Arul Kumaravel [MSFT]

Development Manager,

Windows PowerShell,

My PowerShell blog: https://blogs.msdn.com/arulk

TechEd.zip

PowerShell has been multiyear effort by many members of Windows PowerShell team.  We would like to take this time to thank all our early adopters and customers who provided us with valuable feedback in shaping up this product. It is with pride that we launch this product. 

PowerShell is ready for primetime to solve management problems one script at a time.

Reading an Active Directory object’s attributes involves two simple steps:

1. Connect to the Active Directory object you want to read.
2. Read one or more of the object’s attributes.

The goal of the three scripts in this blog will be to read the description attribute of the HR OU, the MyerKen user account, and the Atl-Users group and display their values on the screen.

Reading an Attribute of an OU

The  following script reads and displays the description attribute of the OU named HR in the na.fabrikam.com domain. To carry out this task, the script performs the following steps:

1. Connect to the HR OU object in the na.fabrikam.com domain.
2. Read the object’s description attribute.

Reading the description Attribute of an OU

$objOU = [ADSI]"LDAP://localhost:389/OU=HR,dc=NA,dc=fabrikam,dc=com"

$objOU.Get("description")

When this script runs in the na.fabrikam.com domain, it echoes the description of the HR OU to the command window, as shown:

Human Resources

Reading an Attribute of a User Account

The following script reads and displays the description attribute of the user account named MyerKen, located in the HR OU of the na.fabrikam.com domain.

1. Connect to the MyerKen user account object in the HR OU of the na.fabrikam.com domain.
2. Read the object’s description attribute.

Reading the description Attribute of a User Account

$objUser = [ADSI]"LDAP://localhost:389/CN=MyerKen,OU=HR,dc=NA,dc=fabrikam,dc=com"

$objUser.Get("description")

When this script runs in the na.fabrikam.com domain, it echoes the description of the user account to the command window, as shown:

HR employee

Reading an Attribute of a Group

The following script reads and displays the description attribute of a global group named Atl-Users, located in the HR OU of the na.fabrikam.com domain.

1. Connect to the Atl-Users group in the HR OU of the na.fabrikam.com domain.
2. Read the object’s description attribute.

Reading the description Attribute of a Group

$objGroup =[ADSI]"LDAP://localhost:389/CN=Atl-users,OU=HR,dc=NA,dc=fabrikam,dc=com"

$objGroup.Get("description")

When this script runs in the na.fabrikam.com domain, it echoes the description of the group to the command window, as shown:

Atlanta users

Important observations about the scripts in this blog

• They perform the same basic steps: They connect to an Active Directory object and read an attribute of the object.
• They use the same method (Get) without regard to the class of object being read.

As demonstrated in this blog, the process for reading attributes is uniform from one object to the next. In fact, within a particular task, the steps you follow from one object to the next are consistent. This consistency empowers you to write scripts that can read thousands of attributes from the many objects stored in Active Directory.

You can access the project at

https://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=PowerShellCX

Existing  Windows PowerShell GotDotNet project at

will be migrated over to this project.

Arul Kumaravel

Development Manager

Windows PowerShell

Microsoft Corporation