To capitalize the first letter in PowerShell, uppercase the first character and add the rest of the string back: $text.Substring(0, 1).ToUpper() + $text.Substring(1). For the whole string, call .ToUpper() or .ToLower(), and for every word, use ToTitleCase: Output: None of these change $city itself. Each one returns a new string, so save the result in … Read more
To check if a registry key exists in PowerShell, pass the key’s path to Test-Path. It returns True when the key is there and False when it isn’t, so you can create the key only when the check fails: Keep -Force inside the if block, because on a key that already exists New-Item -Force quietly … Read more
The PowerShell format operator -f builds a string from a template. Put numbered placeholders like {0} and {1} in the string on the left, and the values on the right: Output: PowerShell drops each value into its placeholder, in order. The same placeholders also take number, date and width formats, which is where -f beats … Read more
To get yesterday’s date in PowerShell, subtract one day from today with (Get-Date).AddDays(-1). The same AddDays() method adds days to any date, and a negative number goes back in time: Output: I pinned the examples to fixed 2026 dates so your output matches mine. In a real script, start from Get-Date instead, and the results … Read more
Import-Csv is the PowerShell cmdlet that reads a CSV file and turns every row into an object. The column headers become property names, so you can sort, filter and loop through the data without parsing text: Output: The file customers.csv holds four US customers with the columns Id, Name, Company, State and Total. I use … Read more
Get-Content is the cmdlet PowerShell gives you for reading files. Point it at a text file and it returns the contents as one string per line: Output: That one-string-per-line design is why it’s also the easiest way to read a file line by line. Below I cover loops, arrays, raw text, the first and last … Read more
Get-Service is the PowerShell cmdlet that reads the Windows services on your PC. On its own it lists every service; pipe it to Where-Object to list only the running ones. Here I check a set of standard Windows services: Output: Without -Name, Get-Service returns every service on the PC. I kept the examples to built-in … Read more
You type echo in PowerShell out of CMD or Bash habit, and it mostly works. Then a sentence splits across three lines, or echo -n does nothing you expected. Quick answer: echo is a built-in alias for Write-Output. It sends objects to the success stream (the pipeline). If nothing consumes them, they’re shown in the … Read more
The PowerShell escape character is the backtick (`), the key just below Esc on a US keyboard. Inside double quotes, a backtick makes the next character literal, like `$, or turns it into a special character, like `t for a tab: Output: A backslash is just a normal character in PowerShell, so Windows paths need … Read more
Creating a directory in PowerShell takes one command: New-Item -Path C:\Reports -ItemType Directory. Change the item type to File and the same cmdlet creates a file. Here are both in one script: Output: New-Item hands back the new item, a DirectoryInfo for a folder and a 0-byte FileInfo for a file, so you can use … Read more