Customising the PowerShell prompt to show date and time

Depending on your reason for using the PowerShell prompt at it, it might be useful to include data such as timestamps in your recorded output, to enable better auditing. This post will walk you through the simple steps needed for customising the PowerShell prompt, including how to show the current date and time. What exactly do I mean by the PowerShell prompt and what does the typical prompt look like by default? Well let me dial it back to default and show you: ...

July 24, 2021 · 3 min · Tom

Prevent Screensavers and Lock-screens with Powershell

There might be a number of reasons to want to prevent your windows screensavers and lock-screens from engaging and in some cases (no doubt yours if you have hit this article from a search engine) local policy on the machine preventing you from changing these settings. Powershell lets us work around this problem and prevent the machine from locking or activating a screensaver. Prevent Screensavers and Lock-screens The bulk of the code below has been lifted from this great write up: https://dmitrysotnikov.wordpress.com/2009/06/29/prevent-desktop-lock-or-screensaver-with-powershell/ I just took things one step further by adding an infinite loop. My version of this code will run indefinitely. ...

March 26, 2020 · 2 min · Tom

Modifying Windows shortcuts is Powershell

I once faced a rather tedious task that involved recursively modifying a number of shortcut paths stored across a convoluted folder structure. There was approximately 100 shortcuts which needed part of their path modifying. The answer: Create a****PowerShell script. The following code utilises regex to check for the existence of a string and modify with the define replacement. It is easily possible to use Read-Host to make this a little bit more interactive, but the purposes of my use-case it was just as simple to modify these variables before running the script. ...

February 13, 2019 · 2 min · Tom

Powershell - Checking the Language Mode

For security purposes, it is possible to control the language mode in a given Powershell session. These language modes can constrict which modules can be loaded during the life of a powershell session. Learn mode about Powershell langeuage modes: About Language Modes – Microsoft Detect the Current Language Mode $sLangMode: $ExecutionContext.SessionState.LanguageMode If ($sLangMode -ne “FullLanguage”){ Write-Host ” !! Unable to run scrit – Powershell Using Wrong Language Mode !! ” } Else{ ...

February 5, 2019 · 1 min · Tom

'Copy, Paste' With Powershell Sendkeys

This is really quick nugget of Powershell for anyone who is struggling to copy and paste into a particular window or dialog box. Perhaps it is a case of a website which prevents text form being sent to a field from the clipboard, or in my case, a windows UAC prompt. If you are following password best practices, your passwords should be long, complex and contain zero dictionary words. Furthermore, you should have a different password for every site and service. So, when a user interface doesn’t allow you to paste a password, life gets that little bit more difficult. ...

February 2, 2019 · 2 min · Tom