The first thing you might notice is that the PowerShell version is a bit shorter. 3 lines of VBscript code, compared to 1 line of PowerShell script. That is, 1 line of code to do the actual ping.

And here is a short program which demonstrates how to use PowerShell to ping a computer:

$computer_name = "WISEFAQDC"

$address_string = "Address=" + "'" + $computer_name +"'"
$ping = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_PingStatus -Filter $address_string
if ($ping.StatusCode -ne 0)
    {
    # the check -ne 0 means the ping check failed.
    Write-Host Server: $computer_name - Not pingable
    }
else
    {
    # the computer is visible on the network.
    Write-Host Server: $computer_name - is alive
    }

It looks like it’s going to be a week of scripting blog posts.  Today’s script is used to reboot a list of remote computers.  Sometimes, when deploying security patches, the computers fails to reboot.  So I use this script to force reboots.  It would be a piece of cake to modify the script, so that it turns off the computers instead.

One of my customers should find that useful.  Out of 2000 computers, about 150 computers get left powered on over the weekend.

What the script does:

• reads the list of computers to be reset from C:\computer_lists\reboot_target_list.txt
  the format of the list is COMPUTERNAME,Reboot Reason
• “Pings” the computer to see if it’s on the network.
• checks to see if someone is logged on.  If someone is, don’t reboot.
• reboots the computer.

Check and reboot computers.ps1

Continue reading →

With PowerShell, I needed to get a count of files in a particular directory.  This is what I came up with.

#
# Get a count of files in a directory.
#
$directory_file_count = "0"
$server_directory_string = "\\WISEFAQDC\c$\downloads"

# check that the directory exists.
$does_directory_exist = (Test-Path $server_directory_string)

# if it does, then continue
if ($does_directory_exist)
{
# file count does include directories but not a count of their contents.
$directory_file_count = (get-childitem $server_directory_string -name).count
Write-Host "Directory file count: $directory_file_count"
}
else
{
# directory doesn't exist
Write-Host "Directory $server_directory_string - DOES NOT EXIST"
}

The only problem with this code is that file count does include directories, but not their contents,  in it’s count of files.