Docs

PowerShell Tip from the Trenches: Searching for Text in Files

As a sysadmin, I often find myself digging through logs, config files, and scripts to troubleshoot issues or verify configurations. One of the most useful PowerShell one-liners in my daily toolkit is this:

Get-ChildItem -Path "C:\Your\Directory" -Recurse -File | Select-String -Pattern "YourSearchText"

This command recursively scans all files in the specified directory and searches for the string "YourSearchText". It’s incredibly handy when you’re hunting down error messages, checking for legacy code, or verifying that certain settings are applied across multiple files.

Powershell Change The Extension Of All Files In A Folder

Someone had to change the extension of some files in order to send them or upload them to share. That’s fine but there’s so many of them! It will take forever to rename them all manually. There must be an easier way. Let’s look at how to use PowerShell to change the extension of all files in a folder:

Open PowerShell:

• Press Win + X and select “Windows PowerShell” from the menu.
• Alternatively, you can search for “PowerShell” in the Start menu and open it.

Navigate to the Target Folder:

HTML templating in Go

Within the Go Standard library HTML package there’s a template package which enables generating HTML page from a rich templating engine with the output safe against code injection. This means there is no need to worry about XSS attacks as Go parses the HTML template and escapes all inputs before displaying it to the browser.

Let’s take a look at a simple example. This example will use a couple of structs to store data about some people and then display that data in an HTML table.

Python date string to date object

If you have a date string and need to convert it into a date object, how can it be converted to a date object using Python?

Python includes within the datetime package a strptime function, here’s an example usage:

>>> import datetime
>>> datetime.datetime.strptime('2022-10-30T14:32:41Z', "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z")
datetime.datetime(2022, 10, 30, 14, 32, 41, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc)

Now that it’s a date object and can be manipulated as needed.

If the date string you have doesn’t match this format, check out the format codes table to find the necessary directives.

Download a file from the web using PowerShell

The Invoke-WebRequest command in PowerShell is very powerful and can be used to do much more then downloading a file. Check out the Invoke-WebRequest documentation page to learn more.

Download a file from the web (http, https)

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "http://192.168.100.123:3000/myzipfile.zip" -OutFile "C:\Documents\myzipfile.zip"

The above command well download a file from the web (in this case a local ip address) and save if under your Documents folder.

Need to Extract a zip file?

Check out Expand-Archive in PowerShell

How to unzip a file in PowerShell?

Have a .zip file and need to extract its entire contents using Powershell? No problem, it’s built in!

Since PowerShell version 5+, there is an Expand-Archive command built in:

Expand-Archive -Path myzipfile.zip -DestinationPath C:\extract\to\here

Not sure which version of PowerShell you have?

$PSVersionTable.PSVersion

Find more information:

man Expand-Archive

Need to Create a zip file?

Check out Compress-Archive in PowerShell

How to zip file(s) in PowerShell?

Have some files and need to create a zip archive using Powershell? No problem, it’s built in!

Since PowerShell version 5+, there is an Compress-Archive command built in:

Compress-Archive -Path file.txt, file2.txt -CompressionLevel Fastest -DestinationPath C:\compress\to\here\myzipfile.zip

Note: There’s a 2 GB max file size limit due to a limitation of the underlying API.

Not sure which version of PowerShell you have?

How to list files in a directory using Go [2023]

In Go there are a couple of options to list the files of a directory using the standard library. In this article you will find a list of three different methods.

Note: Be aware that ioutil.ReadDir is deprecated since Go 1.16. Instead os.ReadDir should be used (shown in this article).

os.ReadDir

os.ReadDir is included in the standard library in the os package. Check out the documentation for more information. It’s a drop in replacement from ioutil.ReadDir.

Change PTWEBSERVER Password

When creating a new PeopleSoft webserver domain, PTWEBSERVER is the user id set by default. In order to avoid issues this id should only be used for the webserver domain configuration. If the password for this user id gets changed it may cause the webserver to not boot up. If the PTWEBSERVER password ever needs to be changed, follow the below steps:

Change the online password for PTWEBSERVER:

This can be done by navigating to

PeopleTools Object Version Tables

PeopleTools Object Versions