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2007-06-19

Running PowerShell Scripts

When I read "Running windows PowerShell Scripts" on Microsoft technet, I wanted blog it. It's a long article. I am kinda disillusioned with PSH at this point :(

Some excerpts:

To summarize, here’s how you run from scripts from within Windows PowerShell:
• Make sure you’ve changed your execution policy. By default, PowerShell won’t run scripts at all, no matter how you specify the path.
• To run a script, specify the entire file path, or either: 1) use the .\ notation to run a script in the current directory or 2) put the folder where the script resides in your Windows path.
• If your file path includes blank spaces, enclose the path in double quote marks and preface the path with an ampersand.
And, yes, that all takes some getting used to. However, you will get used to it. (To make life easier for you, we recommend that you keep all your scripts in one folder, such as C:\Scripts, and add that folder to your Windows path.)

We realize that it’s been awhile, but way back at the start of this article we tried running a Windows PowerShell script by double-clicking a .PS1 file. That didn’t go quite the way we had hoped: instead of running the script all we managed to do was open the script file in Notepad. Interestingly enough, that’s the way it’s supposed to work: as a security measure you can’t start a PowerShell script by double-clicking a .PS1 file. So apparently that means that you do have to start PowerShell before you can run a PowerShell script.

In a somewhat roundabout way, that’s technically true. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t start a PowerShell script from a shortcut or from the Run dialog box; likewise you can run a PowerShell script as a scheduled task.

The secret? Instead of calling the script you need to call the PowerShell executable file, and then pass the script path as an argument to PowerShell.exe. For example, in the Run dialog box you might type a command like powershell.exe –noexit c:\scripts\test.

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