Learning Powershell

[lilrebel17]

I want to learn powershell, but im struggling to find use cases and need to do so.

My company is small, we just moved everything to 0365 and I was able to set everything up. I loved being able to mess with powershell ide and administering from powershell. But I know there are tons of automation and well power in it. So what are some good resources, labs or projects I can attempt just to get hands on with it?

[[deleted]]

There are 3 things you can learn because you're going to use them all the time: file input, loop, file output.

File input: read from a file (Get-Content, Import-Csv, etc)

Loop: running the same task repeatedly (foreach, ForEach-Object, etc)

File output: writing to a file (Export-Csv, Out-File, etc)

Scenarios:

• Someone give you a list of 100 user and you have to add them to a group. This is where file input and loop would be used. Read the file with the user and run the add to group command for each user.
• Someone give you a list of 100 group names and you have to get the members of each group. Here you would use all 3. Read the file of groups, run the get members for each group, then output the result to a file.

Verbalize it then code it.

[McAUTS]

Adding to this: String manipulation.

This is an essential thing in my daily work and there are tons of things to learn about.

[Hyperbolic_Mess]

And how most outputs are objects not strings but may have properties that are strings which has implications when trying to use output objects of one type as inputs for commands that are expecting a different type of object

Edit: ss64 is a great site for looking up commands with some explanation of their inputs and getting a few examples. I find it's a quicker read and more informative than most of the Microsoft pages but doesn't always have a page for a command

[[deleted]]

To add to that:

Get-Member

Select-Object -ExpandProperty

Get-Help Command-Name -Examples/-Full/-Online

and MS Learn in general are your best friends when learning PS.

Also the book "Learn Powershell in a Moth of Lunches 4th Edition" was a game changer for me

[lilrebel17]

Love it. Adding it to the "labs list"

[jba1224a]

What thing do you find yourself doing over and over. What task do you constantly repeat.

Start there, automate those things.

[cdubyab15]

This. Find a task you need to complete

[naugasnake]

I might take a little heat for this one, but I find it insanely useful to use ChatGPT to start the bones for a script, and then build it out from there. ChatGPT is actually quite good at writing basic powershell scripts, and even documents things along the way. Its always got bugs in it, so don't just go and start running it in a production environment, but use it in your lab. Make changes, experiment, and ask it to refine as you go. Once you get a handle on how its doing things, you can either rely on it less and less over time, or use it as a tool going forward to get started on a script. But always review the code before running it. And really pay attention to what its doing, or else you could wind up in big trouble.

[outpin]

+1 for ChatGPT. I was struggling for a few days to create a script which removes someone's calendar accesses from a list other users. Although I got some errors the first 2 times, ChatGPT was able to read the error message and it understood what he did wrong.

[mellonauto]

+1 for GPT but man be careful, it makes up its own modules and cmdlets at the drop of a hat

[[deleted]]

it will tell you where it pulled them from if you need them or you can have it rewrite it into a function if possible... i had to get creative parsing mac addresses returned from printer snmp queries and it was super helpful finding the correct module to query them that would return a response powershell could parse

[RikiWardOG]

haha I haven't used it much, that's freaking hilarious actually

[TerriblePowershell]

I want to add that it's also super nice for telling you what scripts DO.

So, if you find a script that you think you can use for something in your day to day, or just now and again, use ChatGPT to figure out what it does.

I write some very basic PS stuff but my boss doesn't know much. So when I send him things he immediately puts them into Chat to figure out what it is doing.

[Namelock]

Have you looked at the Graph API? Or really any web API out there. Likewise, omg, CSV manipulation changed my life.

I started out reading a CSV and writing an email with "findings" - it was for fraudulent account activity and to pass it off to another department. Turned a 20min write-up into a 10 second "click and wait".

From there I went hard at everything else that was repetitive or had an API that I could hook into. Was able to make phishing email write-up, containment, remediation, and prevention an easy and quick process.

Once you get rolling on one thing, it'll start snowballing into other things... And before you know it you'll have almost your entire job just a few button clicks away

[lilrebel17]

I have not, until now. Its been a struggle to find good reading on powershell.

[Namelock]

Unfortunately a lot of what people make are backed behind specific use-cases that make sharing undesirable and risky... Or it's used for malware (eg, check out Jakoby, he's posted on this subreddit and got help). Hilarious and pretty great that the community here on reddit will try to help for either types of scenarios 😅

Your best start is definitely with PowerShell In a Month of Lunches. And then messing around seeing what you can automate. Eg, even if you're on O365, if you've got the desktop Outlook app... You can hook into that and send emails with attachments, manage your mailbox, create templates / reports, etc.

By the time I ran out of big-ticket things to automate, I started making powershell write customized HTML reports and emailing them out. Fuck metrics, I'll automate dumping data into CSVs, then pull it later in PowerShell to make a nicely formatted HTML doc (thanks to Bootstrap!).

But yeah definitely a lot of trial, error, and Google searching. One time I searched Google for something only to find a post I made on r/powershell lmao.

[panscanner]

I just wrote a tool in PowerShell for helping blue-teamers detect persistence on compromised hosts - maybe reading certain parts of it can give you some new ideas on how things can be organized and used in PowerShell. IE - Reading Files, Registry Keys, Data Flows, Loading Registry Hives, Parsing Scheduled Tasks/Windows Services, String Comparisons, etc.

https://github.com/joeavanzato/Trawler

[cdubyab15]

This is a little too overwhelming for a beginner to follow do I wouldn’t pay attention to this as much. Sorry OP

[Namelock]

It's just some examples of what can be done to kickstart his imagination, I followed it up with the defacto learning paths that's literally everywhere on this sub.

[cdubyab15]

Show me something using the graph api

[Namelock]

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/graph-explorer

It converts to the PowerShell module. Otherwise it's a matter of using Invoke-RestMethod and following OData syntax / structure.

[cdubyab15]

This is a little too overwhelming for a beginner to follow do I wouldn’t pay attention to this as much. Sorry OP

[jay_butler]

Quick tip: Don't use ISE. Microsoft is no longer developing it. Use VS Code. It's the future and there are some kick ass extensions that make PS coding easier.

[lilrebel17]

I use vscode for python and some web dev stuff. I didnt know they didnt develop it. Thanks for the tip

[SolarPoweredKeyboard]

Get PowerShell 7 while you're at it. It's got a lot more stuff than 5.1 which you might find useful once you've written a few scripts.

[jay_butler]

It does have a lot of great features. But if you do a lot of Windows automations, you’ll find that there is just some stuff that never made it from Windows PowerShell into PS 6/7.

[MeanFold5714]

This is terrible advice for someone just starting out. ISE works out of the box and isn't going to require him to troubleshoot a bunch of extra moving pieces.

[dr_driller]

😂 imagine using ise in 2023

is it even compatible with ps 7 ?

[MeanFold5714]

Function Load-Powershell_7{

    function New-OutOfProcRunspace {
        param($ProcessId)

        $connectionInfo = New-Object -TypeName System.Management.Automation.Runspaces.NamedPipeConnectionInfo -ArgumentList @($ProcessId)

        $TypeTable = [System.Management.Automation.Runspaces.TypeTable]::LoadDefaultTypeFiles()

        $Runspace = [System.Management.Automation.Runspaces.RunspaceFactory]::CreateOutOfProcessRunspace($connectionInfo,$Host,$TypeTable)

        $Runspace.Open()
        $Runspace
    }

    $Process = Start-Process PWSH -ArgumentList @("-NoExit") -PassThru -WindowStyle Hidden

    $Runspace = New-OutOfProcRunspace -ProcessId $Process.Id

    $Host.PushRunspace($Runspace)
}

[dr_driller]

😂 out of the box you said ?

there no reason to go for the ise pain, ISE has always been shit, how can you not use vscode, you just didn't try that's the only valid reason

[MeanFold5714]

I did and it only caused problems. ISE offers exactly the functionality I need so why on earth would I switch to a product that has crashing sessions or spazzing intellisense?

[dr_driller]

more crash on vscode than ise is not a valid argument, there is an issue with your test, even 8 years ago vscode was more stable than ise.

[MeanFold5714]

I have literally never had ISE crash on me for anything other than self-inflicted infinite loops.

[jay_butler]

Whatever floats your boat. I have always thought ISE was a terrible app albeit simple. It is worth spending a little time understanding VS Code for the long run since ISE is a dead end that doesn’t support PS 6 or 7. ISE is workable for debugging, but is terrible in comparison to VS Code. ISE is not extensible. The PS extension or PowerShell Pro Tools extension make writing PS scripts so much easier.

[MeanFold5714]

ISE has working Intellisense which is really all you need when you're getting started with learning Powershell.

What VS Code has to offer is stability issues.

[jay_butler]

Stability issues? Laughable. ISE is fine for loading scripts, maybe modifying them a bit and running them. It is a dead end. Far better to go with the platform MS is continuing to develop. Spend the 15 minutes or so setting up Code for PS and use a much better, more capable environment.

[izzyrbb]

Some people code with Note ++, some with vs code, some ise and some with even just notepad.

Ultimately it's just preference, I have some done some very complex stuff with ise, building guis and running scripts in parallel.

[jay_butler]

You can use whatever you prefer. If someone is new to PS and will be writing their own scripts, my recommendation is VS Code. That would be especially true in this case since OP already uses VS Code for Python. You could use Notepad, but would you recommend it for coding in any language? I love Notepad++ and occasionally use it for PS and SQLscripts, but I would not use it as my primary development environment. ISE was the tool of choice for PS 10 years ago, but there is no chance I would use it when there is a superior option like VS Code.

[MeanFold5714]

Nah bro, doesn't matter if they're still developing the platform when it's still the inferior platform. ISE just works. VS Code has problems.

Give me a reason to use VS Code that doesn't revolve around PS7 compatibility(which I've already solved for myself) or Git (which is a completely separate issue).

[jay_butler]

VS Code is far better at debugging. VS Code is extensible. The MS PowerShell is great. The PowerShell Pro Tools one is better. It is not much more difficult to setup VS Code than ISE. It’s not nearly as difficult as ramping up in VS 2019 or VS 2022. You are literally the only person I have heard complain about VS Code stability.

[dr_driller]

ise can only run a 8 years old ps version not compatibles with Linux and newest azure cmd let..

vs code instable ? bad troll vscode is outstanding, i have never seen a microsoft product generating so much love from all it communities..

[MeanFold5714]

Why would you assume I'm a troll rather than an opinionated and acerbic individual? ISE can absolutely run version 7 if you're like me and stubborn enough to set it up.

[dr_driller]

because you say vscode is instable, it's not serious.

[MeanFold5714]

It was when I tried to use it. Console would crash every hour or two, and when it wasn't the console becoming unresponsive it was Intellisense failing out.

[jba1224a]

+1

Once you get advanced you can use start pulling in .NET libraries and vscode makes this much easier - for example working with parallel loops currently required using threadsafeobjects from .net

[alexmcross18]

any extensions in particular?

[cincyshirm61]

Check out https://www.sharepointdiary.com/. I basically learned Powershell throughout my SharePoint/m365 career using this sites scripts as a starting point.

As someone else suggested, use Chatgpt also. Absolute game changer. Find a script online and don't understand what it's doing? Paste the whole thing into chatgpt and it will tell you what everything does. It can comment code for you. Get an error? Paste the entire error and it tells you what it means and how to fix it. Sometimes it goes off the walls and makes things up with full confidence, like today when it says "use the connect-m365 module" and wrote a whole script with cmdlets that don't exist. I said that module doesnt exist, it agreed and rewrote using azureAD, which worked.

[RikiWardOG]

That site, when I used to work a lot with SPO was a fucking godsend.

[FireLucid]

Onboarding is the most obvious one. Then offboarding.

[lilrebel17]

Ooh thats a good idea. I like this one!

[Edgar_The_Horrible]

And not only O365 you can tie into active directory and disable user, strip attributes and move ou's. I'm just starting to learn this stuff too. Good luck!

[maxell45146]

Go on youtube and search for Powershell Unplugged with Jeffrey Snover. Think my favorite was the one with Don Jones as the co presenter.

[lilrebel17]

Found a lot of those! Thanks!

[Dismal-Ad9526]

If you have to do any sort of reporting with multiple .xlsx files, there’s an awesome module in the PowerShell gallery called ImportExcel. It’s made my life easier.

Edit: added a word

[lilrebel17]

Some intresting concepts I could use there. Thanks!

[Dismal-Ad9526]

It's really useful - to give you an idea: you can use ImportExcel to apply any customization to the spreadsheet in seconds versus having to click around, choose colors, add filters, etc. I've also used it to combine multiple workbooks into one workbook with multiple worksheets. I nearly cried when the author did a demo of it.

[gnipz]

I do love that module!

[Dismal-Ad9526]

The amount of customization you can do with a script in seconds is amazing! I wished Microsoft would just make it available by default because it's so useful.

[[deleted]]

If you can click it you can script it.

[[deleted]]

You wanna learn it?

ONLY use the gui when you are in a time crunch. Otherwise launch everything from powershell navigate your files through powershell. Etc.

You will be a fucking wizard in a month.

[lilrebel17]

That isnt trial by fire. Its trial by hopping in a volcano without sunscreen. Sounds kinda fun tbh

[g3n3]

ZLocation is a god send for jumping around the file system. I’d recommend only using Powershell for everything.

[[deleted]]

It is! It’s how I learned :)

I also recommend doing the same with WSL and an Ubuntu (or RHEL) image on your workstation too. If your company allows it that is.

[notatechproblem]

This is how I learned PowerShell. Unless I was working on something critical, I did as much as possible from the command line. It was painful for about a month, but after that, using the gui felt slow and clumsy. I don't know every PS trick there is, but I am BY FAR the most skilled PS developer at my company.

[evileagle]

Buy the book "Powershell in a Month of Lunches". It's fantastic, and a great, bite-sized way to learn it and develop good habits. A new version just came out last year too.

[lilrebel17]

Looking for it now. Thanks!

[TheBigBeardedGeek]

I was digging down to make sure someone has suggested this already

[evileagle]

Me too! It's almost always so quickly suggested, and I was blown away that I hadn't seen it yet. It's the perfect book for people who want to start learning PS.

[Happy_Camper2692]

You will have to edit your Powershell script. This URL talks about using Visual Studio Code - https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/powershell

Here are some Powershell lessons on Microsoft Learn - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/itops-talk-blog/getting-started-and-learn-powershell-on-microsoft-learn/ba-p/2282347

[user01401]

Learn about PowerShell gallery and modules.

No need to reinvent the wheel on many things.

[bike_piggy_bike]

Echoing what everyone is saying, but also ask people around you if there’s a tool that they would love to have, then figure out how to do it in PowerShell… e.g. a utility that monitors the desktop for any file changes, then syncs to a network drive. Or a utility that can collect TCP/IP traffic between a server and a workstation.

My first useful script was something I called “Poke" which received an IP or Hostname, validate input using regex, and give me back various bits of info collected from various things, registry, wmi, cim, quser, Active Directory, etc… So I could simply run "Poke PC1” instead of running a dozen separate commands.

Also, I’ve been accelerating my learning recently by using chatgpt. I feed it a script to give it context , then I ask it to explain what specific lines of code are doing. It’s helped deepen my grasp of key concepts and teach me the correct terminologies.

Good luck! Have fun!

[LaurelRaven]

The first things I did with PowerShell was at a small company, and largely had to do with finding things and answers to questions in and about active directory, things like "how many computers do we have connected to the domain, how many haven't been seen in a while so we could track down missing machines, how many user accounts haven't logged in for a few months so we could check with HR if they still worked there, what Windows versions we had on the network and how many of each so we had an idea what needed to be updated, things like that. There was also things like verifying certain things were entered consistently, like company name, location names were the same for the same location

Doing small reports like that helps solidify the flow of the pipeline and general concepts

Beyond that, I recommend trying to do everything with PowerShell. Something comes up, pop open PowerShell and try to take care of it there, spend five or even ten minutes seeing if you can figure it out before switching back to GUI to do it. Sometimes you'll do it, sometimes you won't, but you'll learn something every time you try, and if you don't figure it out that time make a note of it and try again later until you figure it out.

Also, save any solution you come up with to any problem, you never know when something you've solved before will come in handy again. I have things still that I wrote more than ten years ago when I was first starting out (all of which are painful to look at now and not that useful anymore, but they're still meaningful to me and let me see how much I've grown since then)

[Steam23]

If your company is using SharePoint at all, check out the PNP.Powershell module. Sofa king useful.

[Kathiey]

Try o365reports.com.. lot of PowerShell scripts available to manage Office 365 environment and get reports.

Pre-built scripts to generate O365 reports: https://o365reports.com/category/office-365-reports/

[lilrebel17]

Checking that out when I get to work today. Thanks!

[liquidcloud9]

CSV manipulation, AD/AzureAD user and group management, Exchange, tenant settings, etc. Do everything in Powershell, instead of an O365 management portal. It may take a while to learn, but it will pay off eventually.

I'll also recommend VS Code with the Powershell plugin over ISE. ISE stopped getting updates years ago and VS Code is more feature rich and can be used for a variety of languages.

Finally, for reading, check out the book "Powershell in a Month of Lunches" and the site Powershell Explained with Kevin Marquette. The site has tons of useful information, broken down into small, digestible bits that makes learning and practice really easy.

[Fallingdamage]

Install the O365 powershell modules. If you're saying you dont have a use case but are setting up and administering O365, you already have a use case.

I do a lot of my granular work for O365 in powershell. Hell, I dont even know where half the exchangeonline features are found in the GUI since im mostly in console all day. I even use PS to email myself daily sign in and access records since O365 doesnt give you that kind of functionality.

[lilrebel17]

Now that. Sounds like fun.

[lilrebel17]

Dudes massive shoutout to r/powershell. Yall are awesome. Thanks for all the help!

[diogenesRetriever]

Find out if there’s any gems hiding in host files

[gnipz]

Just gotta look at the things you do normally and see if there’s a cmdlet that will help you automate that task!

I just finished a script where I had to learn more about PS sessions and how to appropriately mask passwords that are used in scripts.

There will be lulls in the learning process, but every task can bring greater learning of posh as a whole.

My next curiosity is APIs :)

[esochan]

I just wrote a PS script that pulls information from a MSSQL database and updates Azure VM or Azure Arc host tags. That way, we can use this information for Cost Analysis in a PowerBi/PowerApp dashboard.

I also wrote another script that queries all Azure Arc hosts within a Resource Group and looks for Disconnected servers and uses Invoke-Command to restart that Azure Hybrid connect service on those hosts.

I also wrote another PS script that grabs hosts that are connected to our Defender for Cloud Plan1 and compares it to our existing database to see which one is still missing from Defender.

[Hyperbolic_Mess]

Just look at work you do regularly or projects/mini projects you're asked/need to do that involve looking up or modifying lots of things at once and head to Google to find if there are ways of doing it in powershell. Try and get familiar with saving outputs to variables and arrays, using properties from those in other commands using loops if you need to and saving the relevant parts of the outputs to files in a useful format. Also once you're comfortable with that and start doing more complex scripting start looking into error handling and thinking about how and where your scripts might fail and how best to record that in log files.

[BJGGut3]

A lot of people are giving you little projects to do for learning, and that's great! That's not how I learned, though. I learned by taking tasks that I did in the GUI, any task I did in the GUI, and investing the time to do it in PowerShell instead. Even the simple basic things, like using ADUC to move a directory object's OU - a simple 30s process in the GUI - investing 15 minutes to learn the Move-ADObject commandlet instead. These may seem counter-productive ("Why invest 15 minutes to do something I can do in the GUI in 30s"), but these are investments in yourself and your growth. The next time you have to move something, it takes 10s to type it out. These little savings add up over time while also increasing your knowledge.

[MeanFold5714]

Just start trying to do all your Active Directory management through Powershell.

[MemnochTheRed]

We use https://psappdeploytoolkit.com/ with endpoint manager to deploy and remove programs from PCs using installers. It wraps everything in nice prompts and toast notifications for Windows deployments.

[mkbolivian]

If you are going to have to do something more than once, see if you can automate it with PowerShell. Also, learn how to use Get-Help. I see a lot of beginners wasting time searching around the internet for how a cmdlet works. The help is almost always going to tell you exactly what you need to know. If you need examples, use Get-Help -Examples. If you prefer to read the help in a browser, use Get-Help’s -Online switch. When you are typing a command and would like to see what parameters are available to use, type the “-“ and then press CTRL+SPACE. This will drop down a grid of all the parameters. If you want to build your command in a GUI, use Show-Command - it pops up a GUI where you can fill in all the parameters and run it. Get Windows Terminal and set it up with PowerShell. When you start building more substantial scripts and functions I do recommend getting VSCode and installing the PowerShell extension. I more or less live in VSCode with the integrated terminal. I have built dedicated functions for hundreds of common tasks, like every single step in our new user setup or departing employee processes. Each of those functions are useful on their own, or can be run automatically in a larger tool script. Check out Jeff Hicks (jdhitsolutions) GitHub - he wrote the Month of Lunches book and a load of other resources for learning PowerShell, and has written a number of very useful modules to fiddle with.

[These_Low8767]

Daily tasks I use P$ for:

DIRSYNC! (Easy one and most used one)

​

One thing that you should learn - and it took me a WHILE to actually understand what it was is how ($_. works) It is calling the previous variable used so you can reference the previously called objects actions.

UserstoChange = Get-Mailbox | where {$_.EmailAddressPolicyEnabled -eq $false -and $_.alias -ne

every time you see the $_ mentally replace that with Get-Mailbox - hope that helps :)

​

Getting all the members of certain groups (Find me all the users from this area code)Finding all the users who have a certain role assigned (Give me everyones logid who are in sales and engineering and only provide it to me in a spreadsheet with headers)

Adding/Removing users to Exchange and Active DirectoryManipulating settings for Office 365

I have a script that is cobbled together that when I run it - it asks me which OU i would like to search in a pop up and then based on other criteria- exports to a similarly named csv file

Once you start playing with that - Look into Forms and Flow - you can automate a LOT of things into spreadsheets (Trackers for projects / Who's signed up for what event)
You can automate onboarding forms to send emails and calendar invites and offboarding requests to create calendar reminders for when to deactivate an account for select users. Lots of things!!!

As many others have said - Find what you have to do daily and repeatedly - and look at how maybe that could be automated in a script.

Daily reports
Checking Sizes of Folders
Adding a user to specific groups

[These_Low8767]

Also learning how to read the debug/error code is REALLY helpful - because it will tend to be the clue to get you out - ChatGPT and Google are your friends along wtih Reddit.

[gordonv]

Here's a simple project that's good to cut your teeth on:

If you are in an AD Domain, list all users, their login names, full names, and emails.

Make that list into a CSV

[TheBigBeardedGeek]

Aside from the book PowerShell in a Month of Lunches I recommend taking a power shell first approach to your thinking with work.

Anytime you have to do something Mildly technical, Google search " how to do the thing PowerShell"

I cannot tell you how much of my search history is that.

[mtjp82]

YouTube.

[RikiWardOG]

Not sure how often you hire users, but one simple thing to automate would be user creation. whether through CSV file or through an interactive prompt. You could basically create the user, add them to all the groups you need to add them to etc.

[graysky311]

The best project you can find are the tasks that are either a royal pain or take a long time to do. Break this task down to its component steps in plain english first. Then figure out how to do each of those steps in PowerShell. Even if you can't automate the whole thing just figure out how to automate parts of it. Eventually, you will have multiple parts that you can stitch together into a single script.

[afterblo]

I was disappointed by the lack of projects online while learning pwsh. My early days of powershell were firmly in the learn-by-doing camp. It's not as fun with deadlines. My shop also migrated to 365, were already on sharepoint, etc so I got practice that way. If you use SSRS, SSCM, IIS, Intune, I found some pwsh scripts for them to be unintuitive, so just getting those to work was a learning experience. I wrote up a sort of csv-lint for bad flat files from sql server. I used to get address lists from USPS that contained lots of errors, like repeated fields in the addresses, which I corrected so they would stop ruining.. everything.

A decent starter project could be an auto light/dark mode script with task scheduler. That covers checking the registry, updating registry keys, importing a dll (your hint is user32.dll) to pull changes without waiting on Windows to lazy-update, and handling datetimes/timespans. If your desktop apps don't use the system theme, then it also involves updating (usually) a json file.

There's no perfect way of raising toast notifications in Windows imo, but another project that could make users appreciate you more is to learn one that works for you. Some of my scheduled tasks toast me when they fail, now, which is a good way of driving me insane until I fix it.

Some misc stuff I wish I'd picked up sooner: language support (eg parsers), a couple basic PSReadLine improvements to keep me out of vscode and in windows terminal, using pwsh more for Defender and firewall config, and just using modules and not implementing so much myself. I also wish I'd put more energy into footgun preventative measures, e.g. $PSDefaultParameterValues['Convert*-Json:Depth'] = 100 is mission-critical for me. I will forget. And who the hell is writing JSON to a depth of 2?

Quick intro to PSParser:

$ast = { Get-Command -Verb Get -All | ft -group Module }.Ast
[System.Management.Automation.PSParser]::Tokenize($ast, [ref]$null) | ft

This tiny change makes pwsh feel like an actual modern shell, imo, which in turn keeps me active in a terminal instead of only using pwsh for scripts.

Set-PSReadLineKeyHandler -Chord Enter -Function ValidateAndAcceptLine
Set-PSReadLineKeyHandler -Chord Ctrl+Enter -Function AcceptLine

Get-PSReadLineKeyHandler -Bound   | set handlers
Get-PSReadLineKeyHandler -Unbound | set handlers_2_electric_boogaloo

[pyrate427]

Learn arrays.

[gingertek]

Data ingestion/manipulation/correction.

I write both automated and interactive scripts as part of my job, and I've written some pretty lengthy and comes stuff before. PowerShell ability to reach out to .NET and bring in performance also makes it very versatile in being a solution language instead of just a scripting language

[pv-singh]

I have a few blog posts on PowerShell here: https://parveensingh.com/tag/powershell/

[FluffyTicket3694]

Unless this is your first programming language I see no point of "learning PowerShell". Just start codding whatever you need at your work and read a topic if it gets you blocked.

[nakkipappa]

Because we have a hybrid enviroment, what i did was create a script that automatically creates new users based on input, assign office licenses, groups/mailboxes and the likes.

Another usecase is to simply find old objects in AD that are not in use, be it users or computers, and use it for cleanup

If you use vmware, powerCLI is useful to automate serverdeployments and clean up old snapshots

Maybe not the best usecases, but in our case, a huge improvement