Powershell Cmdlet and Alias listing

Generate a list of PowerShell Cmdlets:

"Name`tSynopsis`tDescription`tFile"
ls -recurse $PSHOME *-Help.xml | foreach {
$fileName = $_.Name
$help = [xml](gc $_.fullName)
$help.helpitems.command | foreach {
write-output ([string]::format("{0}`t{1}`t{2}`t{3}",$_.details.name.trim(),$_.details.description.get_InnerText().trim(),$_.description.get_InnerText().trim().replace("`n", " "),$fileName))
}
}

Generate a list of Aliases:

"Name`tDefinition"
get-alias | sort -property Name | select Name, Definition |% {
write-output ([string]::format("{0}`t{1}", $_.Name,$_.Definition))
}

Each output is tab delimited.

Generate .NET Guid

To generate a .NET guid in PowerShell:

Write-Host ([System.Guid]::NewGuid())

Or to generate a bunch of guids:

1..30 |% { Write-Host ([System.Guid]::NewGuid()) }

Counting # of matching lines in file

I wanted to scan a large number XML files and determine which ones had more than 20 elements of a particular type. Here was the PowerShell command-line I used to report on files that contains more than 20 "" elements:

gci *.xml |% {$fn=$_.name; gc $_ | where {$_ -match ""} |% {$count = 0}{++$count}{if ($count -gt 20) {$fn}}}

An easier, but not very good for performance if a large number of files are involved is:

gci f_*.xml | select-string "" | group filename | where {$_.count -gt 20} | select count, name