PowerShell 7 added a ternary operator, condition ? valueIfTrue : valueIfFalse, that returns one of two values in a single expression. It’s the short form of if/else, and here it picks a status and a singular or plural word: Output: It doesn’t exist in Windows PowerShell 5.1, so I’ll show the 5.1 equivalents too. The … Read more
To convert pwdLastSet to a date in PowerShell, pass the number to [datetime]::FromFileTimeUtc(). pwdLastSet is a Windows FILETIME, the count of 100-nanosecond ticks since January 1, 1601 in UTC: Below I convert it to Eastern time, handle the special 0 value, turn a date back into a FILETIME for LDAP filters and build a password … Read more
To read a JSON file into an array in PowerShell, read the whole file as one string with Get-Content -Raw and pipe it to ConvertFrom-Json. A JSON array becomes a PowerShell array of objects: That one line covers most files. The rest of this guide handles the cases that break it: one-item arrays, nested arrays, … Read more
A PowerShell ordered array is usually an ordered hashtable: put [ordered] in front of @{} and the keys stay in the order you typed them. Plain arrays already keep their order, so they don’t need anything extra: Below, I’ll add, insert, read and sort entries, then cover the collections that keep items sorted. I tested … Read more
The short version of Where-Object vs Select-Object: Where-Object decides which objects (rows) stay in the pipeline, and Select-Object decides which properties (columns) each object keeps. Most real commands use both, filter first: I’ll show what each cmdlet returns, why the order matters, the row tricks Select-Object also has, and one version difference between PowerShell 7 … Read more
To expand an array in PowerShell, pipe the objects to Select-Object -ExpandProperty and name the property that holds the array. You get every value as its own item instead of a {a, b} blob: Below I cover dot notation, keeping the parent value, the {a, b, c…} display limit, flattening nested arrays and growing an … Read more
To convert a UTF-8 file to ANSI in PowerShell 7.4 or later, read it as UTF-8 and write it back with -Encoding ansi: Windows PowerShell 5.1 has no ansi value and uses -Encoding Default instead, which means something completely different in PowerShell 7. Below I check the real bytes in both versions and show a … Read more
To reverse an array in PowerShell, pass it to the .NET [array]::Reverse() method. It flips the items in place, so the same variable now holds them in the opposite order: To keep the original order too, a negative index range gives you a reversed copy. I ran each method in PowerShell 7 and 5.1. Reverse … Read more
The quickest way to clear an array in PowerShell is to assign it a new empty array with @(). The variable then holds zero items: That isn’t the only option, and the obvious one, $cities.Clear(), doesn’t do what most people expect. I tested each method in PowerShell 7 and 5.1, and one works only in … Read more
To remove blank lines from an array in PowerShell, pipe the array to Where-Object and keep only items that aren’t null, empty or whitespace: I tested every example below in PowerShell 7 and Windows PowerShell 5.1, including a popular shortcut that crashes on null items. Remove blank lines from an array with Where-Object This array … Read more