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Inline Comments in Multiline PowerShell Commands and Scripts

Questions about the use of line continuation (\) together with inline comments (# comment) in shell scripts is a somewhat frequent topic on Unix and Linux forums. Unfortunately, there is no simple elegant solutions available for any of the standard shells such as bash, ksh93, zsh or the POSIX shell. Consider the following simple shell script: #!/bin/ksh93 find ./ \ -type f \ -name “*.pyc” Suppose you want to add comments describing each argument to the find utility. You might (I did the first time I came across this issue!) naively expect the following to work: #!/bin/ksh93 find ./ \

Vista VMware Network Connections

By default, VMware virtual network adapters show up as an unidentified network with limited connectivity. This post discusses the underlying reasons and shows you how to resolve the problem either manually or using a Windows PowerShell script.

PowerShell CTP3

There was an early Christmas present from the Windows PowerShell (AKA PoSH) Team.  The Community Technology Preview 3 (CTP3) of Windows PowerShell v2.0 was released on December 23rd just in time for Christmas.  The announcement is here.  As expected CTP3 builds on the new technology provided in CTP2 which was released in May 2008.  You can download CTP3 from the Microsoft Download Center. Hemant Mahawar, Program Manager for PowerShell, summarized the CTP3 release as follows: This release brings, among other things, performance improvements … things will be faster/more efficient than before. PowerShell remoting now allows implicit remoting where command execution appears to be local

More on PowerShell

Microsoft’s PowerShell is radically different than shells on UNIX or GNU Linux systems in that Powershell can deal in objects rather than just plain text. A concrete example may help you more quickly understand the difference.  Suppose you want to get and save information about all the files in a certain subdirectory.   We want to get not only the names of the files but as much metadata as possible relating to each file such as date of creation, date of modification, etc.  This information also needs to be stored in a single XML document.  To keep the size of this post manageable,

PowerShell Grows Up

I am excited about the emminent release of Microsoft Windows Powershell Version 2 CTP3 (Community Technology Preview Version 3) which is due “real soon now.”   The first CTP for Powershell 2.0 was in November 2007 and there has been a lot of progress on the product since then.  See the permanant link at the side of my blog to access the Powershell developers blog. Why am I, a UNIX/Linux developer, excited by Powershell V2?  After all it does not run on any UNIX or GNU Linux platform and microsoft has no plans to port itMto these platforms.  The main reason is that Powershell