Powershell Ramblings

Powershell has excellent documentation. The examples especially are brilliant. As a newcomer to the shell I wanted to read all about_* pages. So I wrote a little script that I want to share.

$helppages = “”

foreach ($item in (get-help about_ ) ) {

$helppages += $item 

}

$helppages | more

I’m a huge fan of 9gag and over the years I have collected a lot of posts. I wanted to create a personal database of the posts, because they are all experiencies that can be relived.

I haven’t formatted my machine for 3+ months, which is unusual for me. Therefore I had a LOT of *.jpg files sitting in my downloads folder and it slowed me down. 

I was a linux user for a long time, so I didn’t know how to achieve such things in windows. But after using powershell for a couple of hours, I really liked it. At first it seemed silly, closed source bull-shit. I’ve recently read Hackers & Painters so I was thinking bash is much simpler and efficient. But it turned out that Powershell had a different philosophy. Everything is objects instead of text streams. One can use the entire .net libraries. Awesome.

So how to move all *.jpg files to another folder

mkdir newfolder

mv $(Get-ChildItem . *.jpg) /.newfolder

Step by step Explanation

First you create a folder with mkdir

Then you use the mv to move files. Mv takes two parameters the object to be moved and the destination.

$() evaluates a command just like in bash. 

Get-ChildItem is the equivalent of ls or dir in powershell. 

. represents the current directory

*.jpg is the wildcard expression of all jpg files.

I hope it helped you! I glazed at the screen for a while after it worked.

If you want to learn more about powershell Get-Help :D

PS: BTW If update-help doesn’t work, try running it with administrator privileges. 

Edit: You could also do this by specifying a path parameter directly to move. But where is the fun in that ;-)