PowerShell Troubleshooting Guide

Table of Contents

PowerShell Troubleshooting Guide

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

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Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. PowerShell Primer

Introduction

Cmdlets

The big three cmdlets

Functions

Scripts

Pipelines

How pipelines change the game

What's the fuss about sorting?

Variables

Modules

Further reading

Summary

2. PowerShell Peculiarities

PowerShell strings

String substitution

How string substitution goes wrong

Escaping in PowerShell strings

Function output

Pipeline processing

PowerShell error handling

The trap statement

try, catch, and finally statements

Non-terminating errors

Further reading

Summary

3. PowerShell Practices

Filter left

Format right

Comment-based help

Using Write-* cmdlets

Write-Host

Output – the correct way

What about the other Write-* cmdlets?

Which Write should I use?

Write-Verbose

Write-Debug

Write-Warning

Write-Error

Write-Progress

Further reading

Summary

4. PowerShell Professionalism

Naming conventions

Cmdlet and function naming

Parameter naming

Module naming

Variable naming

Modularization

Breaking a process into subtasks

Helper functions

Single responsibility principle

Don't repeat code

Understanding the process

Version control

Using version control with PowerShell

Unit testing

Rolling your own unit tests

Why is PowerShell testing difficult?

An introduction to Pester

Mocking with Pester

Further reading

Summary

5. Proactive PowerShell

Error handling

Error-handling guidelines

Error-handling techniques

Investigating cmdlet error behavior

Catch and release

CmdletBinding()

Common parameter support

SupportsShouldProcess

Parameter name validation

Parameter value validation

Pipeline input

Pipelines and function execution

Parameter type transformation

#REQUIRES statements

Set-StrictMode and Set-PSDebug -strict

Further reading

Summary

6. Preparing the Scripting Environment

Validating operating system properties

Workstation/server version

Operating system version

Putting it all together

Validating service status

Validating disk and memory availability

Validating network connectivity

Using telnet

Using Test-NetConnection

Writing Test-NetConnection in downstream versions

Testing UDP and ICMP connectivity

Validating connectivity prior to implementation

Putting it all together

Further reading

Summary

7. Reactive Practices – Traditional Debugging

Reading error messages

The color problem

Changing console colors

Changing ISE colors

PowerShell profiles

Error message content

Using Set-PSDebug

Debugging in the console

Debugging in the ISE

Event logs

Listing event logs

Reading event logs

Writing to event logs

The PSDiagnostics module

Using –confirm and –whatif

Reducing input set

Using Tee-Object to see intermediate results

Replacing the foreach loop with the foreach-object cmdlet

Further reading

Summary

8. PowerShell Code Smells

Code smells

Code smells, best practices, antipatterns, and technical debt

Language-agnostic code smells

PowerShell-specific code smells

Missing Param() statements

Homegrown common parameters

Unapproved verbs

Accumulating output objects

Sequences of assignment statements

Using untyped or [object] parameters

Static analysis tools – ScriptCop and Script Analyzer

ScriptCop

Script Analyzer

Further reading

Summary

Index

PowerShell Troubleshooting Guide

PowerShell Troubleshooting Guide

Copyright © 2014 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: November 2014

Production reference: 1211114

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

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Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78217-357-1

www.packtpub.com

Cover image by Michal Jasej (<milak6@wp.pl>)

Credits

Author

Michael Shepard

Reviewers

Christian Droulers

Rob Huelga

Steve Shilling

Acquisition Editor

Meeta Rajani

Content Development Editor

Adrian Raposo

Technical Editors

Tanvi Bhatt

Pragnesh Billimoria

Copy Editors

Simran Bhogal

Maria Gould

Ameesha Green

Project Coordinator

Kinjal Bari

Proofreaders

Simran Bhogal

Joel T. Johnson

Indexer

Monica Ajmera Mehta

Production Coordinator

Alwin Roy

Cover Work

Alwin Roy

About the Author

Michael Shepard has been working with computers since the early '80s, starting with an Apple II in school and a Commodore 64 at home. He started working in the IT industry in 1989 and has been working full-time since 1997. He has been working at Jack Henry & Associates, Inc. since 2000. His focus has changed over the years from being a database application developer to a DBA, an application admin, and is now a solutions architect. In his years as a DBA, he found PowerShell to be a critical component in creating the automation required to keep up with a growing set of servers and applications. He is active in the PowerShell community at Stack Overflow and projects at CodePlex. He has been blogging about PowerShell since 2009 at http://powershellstation.com.

I'd like to thank my employer, Jack Henry & Associates, Inc., for allowing me the freedom over the last few years to both learn and teach PowerShell. My wonderful wife, Stephanie, and my children, Simeon and Gwen, also deserve thanks for humoring me when I can't stop talking about PowerShell, and for giving me some breathing room to write.

About the Reviewers

Christian Droulers is a late-blooming software developer. He only started programming in college and has not stopped since. He's interested in beautiful, clean, and efficient code.

Steve Shilling has worked in the IT industry commercially since 1987, but started with computers in 1982 writing BASIC programs and debugging game programs written by others. He has broad knowledge about Unix, Windows, and Mainframe systems. He primarily lives in the Unix/Linux world automating systems for deployments and businesses, and has spent many years working in system administration, software development, training, and managing technical people. He remains in the technical field of expertise providing knowledge and experience to companies around the world to make their systems stable, reliable, and delivered on time. His experience has taken him through many different industries covering banking and finance, insurance services, betting exchanges, TV and media, retail, and others, allowing him to have a unique perspective of IT in business where most have only worked in one industry.

Steve works for TPS Services Ltd., which specializes in IT training and consultancy, life coaching, management training, and counselling. The IT part of TPS Services Ltd. specializes in Linux/Unix systems for small, medium, and large organizations, and the integration of Linux and Windows systems.

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Preface

PowerShell Troubleshooting Guide uses easy-to-understand examples to explain the PowerShell language, enabling you to spend more of your time writing code to solve the problems you face and less time agonizing over syntax and cryptic error messages. Beginning with the foundations of PowerShell, including functions, modules, and the pipeline, you will learn how to leverage the power built into the language to solve problems and avoid reinventing the wheel. Writing code in PowerShell can be fun, and once you've learned the techniques in this book, you will enjoy PowerShell more and more.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, PowerShell Primer, provides a brief introduction to some of the most important entities in the PowerShell language including cmdlets, functions, scripts, and modules. A special emphasis is placed on the importance of the pipeline in PowerShell operations.

Chapter 2, PowerShell Peculiarities, includes a number of features of the PowerShell language, which are unusual when compared with other mainstream programming languages. Examples of these topics are output from functions and non-terminating errors.

Chapter 3, PowerShell Practices, shows a few ways that the scripting experience in PowerShell can be improved, either in performance or in maintainability. A lengthy discussion of the various output cmdlets is included.

Chapter 4, PowerShell Professionalism, gives examples of practices that might not be as familiar to traditional system administrators but are common among professional developers. These practices will help scripters create more reliable products and be more confident when making changes to existing codebases.

Chapter 5, Proactive PowerShell, presents a number of practices that, when applied to code, will result in more flexible code with fewer bugs. In a sense, this is pre-emptive troubleshooting, where we create our code thoughtfully in order to reduce the need for troubleshooting later.

Chapter 6, Preparing the Scripting Environment, covers the idea of knowing the characteristics of the environment in which your scripts are running. We also spend some effort trying to weed out network connectivity issues.

Chapter 7, Reactive Practices – Traditional Debugging, shows how to perform traditional troubleshooting in PowerShell using the debugging features of the console and the ISE, along with other techniques. It wraps up with an example of how using the wrong PowerShell feature to perform an operation can lead to poor performance.

Chapter 8, PowerShell Code Smells, explains the concept of code smells (signs of poorly implemented code) and compares it with antipatterns, best practices, and technical debt. It then shows some ways that PowerShell code might begin to smell.

What you need for this book

Most of the examples in the book will work with PowerShell Version 2.0 and above. In places where a higher version of the engine is required, it will be indicated in the text. You should have no problems running the provided code on either a client installation (Windows 7 or greater) or a server installation (Windows Server 2008 R2 or greater).

Who this book is for

This book is intended for anyone who has some experience with PowerShell and would like to expand their understanding of the language design and features in order to spend less time troubleshooting their code. The examples are designed to be understood without needing any specific application knowledge (for example, Exchange, Active Directory, and IIS) in order to keep the intent clear. A few sections are aimed at system administrators specifically. This is due to the different skill set that most administrators bring to the table compared with developers. However, the points made are applicable to anyone using PowerShell.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: The Get-Help cmdlet has a number of switches that control precisely what help information is displayed.

A block of code is set as follows:

param($name)

    $PowerShellVersion=$PSVersionTable.PSVersion

    return We're using $PowerShellVersion, $name!

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

#find largest 5 items in the directory tree

dir -recurse |

  tee-object –Variable Files |

  sort-object Length |

  tee-object –Variable SortedFiles |

  select-object -last 5

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

Get-ChildItem c:\program files –include *.dll –recurse

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: It features a button labeled Scan Script, a gear button for options, and a grid for results.

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

Reader feedback

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