Archive for the ‘PowerShell’ Category
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/05/23
More than a decade ago I wrote about Programmatic alternatives to Windows-L keyboard shortcut (SwitchUser / LockWorkstation).
Still, I see many scripts invoke rundll32.exe or to call the [Wayback/Archive] LockWorkStation function (winuser.h) inside user32.dll. Don’t!
The BOOL LockWorkStation()function has a calling convention that is incompatible with rundll32.exe () which will corrupt the call stack likely will lead to random problems as after two decades, this post from Raymond Chen still holds: [Wayback/Archive] What can go wrong when you mismatch the calling convention? – The Old New Thing
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Posted in .NET, Batch-Files, C#, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Security, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2016 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2023/10/10
For tomorrow’s post Ookla speedtest CLI for Windows has some undocumented arguments to accept license and GDPR I neede the full path to the speedtest.exe which I had installed using Chocolatey.
I know chocolatey uses a shim that redirects to the actual executable, so a simple where speedtest.exe would not cut it.
My guess would be that the generated shim allowed to either get the target pathname out, or have the target pathname encoded in it.
Luckily the first applies: a few of the shim command-line parameters are in [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software Docs | Executable shimming (like symlinks but better):
You pass these arguments to an executable that is a shim (e.g. executables in the bin directory of your Chocolatey install, not choco.exe):
--shimgen-help – shows this help menu and exits without running the target--shimgen-log – logging is shown on command line--shimgen-waitforexit – explicitly tell the shim to wait for target to exit – useful when something is calling a gui and wanting to block – command line programs explicitly have waitforexit already set.--shimgen-exit – explicitly tell the shim to exit immediately.--shimgen-gui – explicitly behave as if the target is a GUI application. This is helpful in situations where the package did not have a proper .gui file.--shimgen-usetargetworkingdirectory – set the working directory to the target path. Useful when programs need to be running from where they are located (usually indicates programs that have issues being run globally).--shimgen-noop – Do not actually call the target. Useful to see what would happen if you ran the command.
But the below dumps show more more (using [Wayback/Archive] Strings – Windows Sysinternals | Microsoft Docs, [Wayback/Archive] clip | Microsoft Docs and post-processing in [Wayback/Archive] Notepad++).
Back to the second solution,
strings C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\bin\speedtest.exe | findstr speedtest.exe
showed
speedtest.exe
..\\lib\speedtest\tools\speedtest.exe
Cannot find file at '..\\lib\speedtest\tools\speedtest.exe' (
speedtest.exe
speedtest.exe
And towards the first,
strings C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\bin\speedtest.exe | clip
resulted in this fragment:
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Posted in Batch-Files, Chocolatey, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2023/09/11
Only having really learned to speak English starting in my late teens, I never got the “smarter than the average bear” reference, so I filed what I thought was a bug early 2019: [Wayback/Archive] “You must be smarter than the average bear…” after upgrading to 7zip.install v18.6 and notepadplusplus.install v7.6.2 · Issue #1700 · chocolatey/choco which last year got this useful comment
I had this for several packages now, since I am updating them daily.
I am assuming there is a way to remove versions, which leads to this error until there is a new update.
It was confirmed this summer from
I’m smarter than the average bear at least once or twice a month. I think it might be packages which are pulled back and you happen to have installed that version
The bug got referenced this summer from [Wayback/Archive] Remove warning message about “smarter than the average bear” · Issue #3186 · chocolatey/choco.
This in turn lead to [Wayback/Archive] (#3186) Remove easter egg “You are smarter than the average bear …” by pauby · Pull Request #3276 · chocolatey/choco
That made me realise that for large groups of English speaking people “smarter than the average bear” would actually be a well known thing.
So I searched and learned a thing or two:
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Posted in .NET, Chocolatey, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/17
A while ago, I needed the file information of wsl.exe on one of my Windows systems.
On Linux, I would do something like file `which bash` where file will give the file details and which gets you the full path to bash.
The file equivalent on Windows for me is [Wayback/Archive] Sigcheck – Windows Sysinternals | Microsoft Docs, which is part of [Wayback/Archive] File and Disk Utilities – Windows Sysinternals | Microsoft Docs.
The which equivalent on Windows for me is [Wayback/Archive] where | Microsoft Docs.
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Posted in bash, Batch-Files, CommandLine, Development, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development | 1 Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/10
Sometimes, you want to restart the Windows explorer. This is already an exception case which you want to do when explorer hangs (for instance when taskbar icons do not respond any more), or has files locked which need to be modified. I described the latter in Inno Setup: Program Folder not showing up In Start > All Programs , with this very simple restart script:
taskkill /F /IM explorer.exe
start explorer
Even more exception is wanting to run explorer with a UAC elevated administrative token. I sometimes do this when moving around stuff from other users on the same computer without having them logged on (as that would lock the files or directories to be moved around).
The risk of running explorer under UAC elevation, is that any program you start will also start UAC elevated, so beware what you ask for…
This is how you start explorer under UAC elevation:
pwsh.exe -nol -noni -nop -w hidden -c "taskkill /f /im explorer.exe; start explorer -v runas -a /nouaccheck"
or if you run an older Windows version of PowerShell:
PowerShell.exe -nol -noni -nop -w hidden -c "taskkill /f /im explorer.exe; start explorer -v runas -a /nouaccheck"
These command-line options and verbs are used:
Time to explain a few:
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Posted in Batch-Files, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7, Windows 8.1 | 1 Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/10/26
With APIs, you always hope that Get and Set methods mirror each other. More often than not, they don’t.
Take for instance these two:
They are far from symmetric: [Wayback/Archive] Get-NetFirewallRule shows far less than [Wayback/Archive] Set-NetFirewallRule allows you to set (first and foremost the various port related properties). It can be worked around though.
There are a few posts discussing this, of which I think these two are the most important:
Both above posts via [Wayback/Archive] “Get-NetFirewallRule” “LocalPort” – Google Search.
This is what I was after:
PowerShell "Get-NetFirewallRule -Name 'RemoteDesktop-UserMode-In-TCP' | Select-Object Name,DisplayName,Enabled,Direction,@{Name='Protocol';Expression={($PSItem | Get-NetFirewallPortFilter).Protocol}},Action,@{Name='LocalPort';Expression={($PSItem | Get-NetFirewallPortFilter).LocalPort}}"
Or actually:
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Posted in CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Remote Desktop Protocol/MSTSC/Terminal Services, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/07/06
Early june, I blogged about Wake-on-LAN from a Windows machine.
My plan was to adopt [Wayback/Archive.is] Wake.ps1 into Wake-on-LAN.ps1 (as naming is important).
One of the goals was to support multiple hardware MAC address formats, especially as Wake.ps1 had the below comment, but did support the AA-BB-CC-DD-EE-FF, though not the AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF hardware MAC address format:
<#
...
.NOTES
Make sure the MAC addresses supplied don't contain "-" or ".".
#>
A colon separated hardware MAC address would result in this error inside the call to the [Wayback/Archive.is] PhysicalAddress.Parse Method (System.Net.NetworkInformation) | Microsoft Docs:
Send-Packet : Exception calling "Parse" with "1" argument(s): "An invalid physical address was specified."
So I did some digging, starting inside the above mentioned blog post, and adding more:
- Wake.ps1 uses the [Wayback/Archive.is]
Parse method in the [Wayback/Archive.is] PhysicalAddress.cs source code in C# .NET, which contains code like this:
//has dashes?
if (address.IndexOf('-') >= 0 ){
hasDashes = true;
buffer = new byte[(address.Length+1)/3];
}
- The Perl script at [Wayback/Archive.is] wakeonlan/wakeonlan at master · jpoliv/wakeonlan that started my first blog post in this series which mentions:
xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (canonical)xx-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx (Windows)xxxxxx-xxxxxx (Hewlett-Packard switches)xxxxxxxxxxxx (Intel Landesk)
I should rename the first one IEEE 802, as per this:
- The MAC address: Notational conventions – Wikipedia
The standard (IEEE 802) format for printing EUI-48 addresses in human-friendly form is six groups of two hexadecimal digits, separated by hyphens (-) in transmission order (e.g. 01-23-45-67-89-AB). This form is also commonly used for EUI-64 (e.g. 01-23-45-67-89-AB-CD-EF).[2] Other conventions include six groups of two hexadecimal digits separated by colons (:) (e.g. 01:23:45:67:89:AB), and three groups of four hexadecimal digits separated by dots (.) (e.g. 0123.4567.89AB); again in transmission order.[30]
The latter is used by Cisco (see for instance [Wayback/Archive.is] Cisco DCNM Security Configuration Guide, Release 4.0 – Configuring MAC ACLs [Support] – Cisco and [Wayback/Archive.is] Cisco IOS LAN Switching Command Reference – mac address-group through revision [Support] – Cisco), so another format to add:
- [Wayback/Archive.is] PhysicalAddress.Parse Method (System.Net.NetworkInformation) | Microsoft Docs remarks:
The address parameter must contain a string that can only consist of numbers and letters as hexadecimal digits. Some examples of string formats that are acceptable are as follows:
00112233445500-11-22-33-44-550011.2233.445500:11:22:33:44:55F0-E1-D2-C3-B4-A5f0-e1-d2-c3-b4-a5
Use the GetAddressBytes method to retrieve the address from an existing PhysicalAddress instance.
- After a bit more digging via [Wayback/Archive.is] “three groups of four hexadecimal digits separated by dots” – Google Search , I found that even more hardware MAC address formats are in use as per [Wayback/Archive.is] What are the various standard and industry practice ways to express a 48-bit MAC address? – Network Engineering Stack Exchange.
I really do not have all the sources for the various representations for 48-bit MAC addresses, but I have seen them variously used:
AA-BB-CC-DD-EE-FF
AA.BB.CC.DD.EE.FF
AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF
AAA-BBB-CCC-DDD
AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD
AAA:BBB:CCC:DDD
AAAA-BBBB-CCCC
AAAA.BBBB.CCCC
AAAA:BBBB:CCCC
AAAAAA-BBBBBB
AAAAAA.BBBBBB
AAAAAA:BBBBBB
From the last list, which is far more complete than the others, I recognise quite a few from tools I used in the past, but too forgot the actual sources, so I took the full list from there and tried to name them in parenthesis after the links I found above and what I remembered:
AABBCCDDEEFF (Bare / Landesk)AA-BB-CC-DD-EE-FF (IEEE 802 / Windows)AA.BB.CC.DD.EE.FF (???)AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF (Linux / BSD / MacOS)AAA-BBB-CCC-DDD (???)AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD (Cisco?)AAA:BBB:CCC:DDD (???)AAAA-BBBB-CCCC (???)AAAA.BBBB.CCCC (Cisco / Brocade)AAAA:BBBB:CCCC (???)AAAAAA-BBBBBB (Hewlett-Packard networking)AAAAAA.BBBBBB (???)AAAAAA:BBBBBB (???)
Some additional links in addition to the ones above:
–jeroen
Posted in .NET, CommandLine, Development, Encoding, HEX encoding, Network-and-equipment, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/06/29
On my list of things to play around with: [Wayback/Archive.is] chocolatey-community/chocolatey-test-environment: A testing setup related to how the Chocolatey Package Verifier runs testing. Used for manual testing or prior to submission
It sort of is a standalone version of the [Wayback] Chocolatey Software Docs | Package Verifier Moderation Service that you can use to check Chocolatey package that you develop/modify.
From the github repository README:
Requirements
You need a computer with:
- a 64-bit processor and OS
- Intel VT-x enabled (usually not an issue if your computer is newer than 2011). This is necessary because we are using 64bit VMs.
- Hyper-V may need to be disabled for Virtualbox to work properly if your computer is a Windows box. NOTE: This may actually not be required.
- At least 10GB of free space.
Setup
To get started, ensure you have the following installed:
- Vagrant 1.8.1+ – linked clones is the huge reason here. You can technically use any version of Vagrant 1.3.5+. But you will get the best performance with 1.8.x+. It appears you can go up to Vagrant 2.1.5, but may have some issues with 2.2.2 and Windows guests (newer versions may be fine).
- Virtualbox 4.3.28+ – 6.1.6 (this flows in the selection of Vagrant – 5.2.22 seems to have some issues but newer versions may work fine)
- vagrant sahara plugin (
vagrant plugin install sahara)
NOTE: If you decide to run with version 1.8.1 of Vagrant, you are going to need to set the VAGRANT_SERVER_URL environment variable as described in this forum post, otherwise, you will get an HTTP 404 error when attempting to download the base vagrant box used here.
Related: people wanting to do a similar thing for Linux: [Archive.is] chocolatey/choco: Has anyone ever tried to set up virtual box with linux (e.g. ubuntu) for choco testing ? – Gitter
Yes, it should work for choco new, choco pack, and choco push, running on mono.
[Wayback/Archive.is] https://github.com/chocolatey/choco/runs/3660684196?check_suite_focus=true
…
There is also a dockerfile available here:
[Wayback/Archive.is] https://github.com/chocolatey/choco/tree/develop/docker
However, as @AdmiringWorm said, there are not any official builds or official support at this time.
…
In my own private fork of choco however I’m using such interfaces as RestartManager
[DllImport("rstrtmgr.dll", SetLastError = true, CharSet = CharSet.Auto)]
static extern int RmStartSession(out uint pSessionHandle,
int dwSessionFlags,
string strSessionKey);
[DllImport("rstrtmgr.dll", SetLastError = true)]
static extern int RmEndSession(uint pSessionHandle);
[DllImport("rstrtmgr.dll", SetLastError = true)]
static extern int RmGetList(uint dwSessionHandle,
out uint pnProcInfoNeeded,
ref uint pnProcInfo,
[In, Out] ProcessInfo[] rgAffectedApps,
ref uint lpdwRebootReasons);
those will be windows specific indeed, but I’ll reach them later on.
–jeroen
Posted in .NET, Chocolatey, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/06/16
Adapted from [Archive.is] How can you export the Visual Studio Code extension list? – Stack Overflow, presuming that code is on the PATH:
- From the command-line interface on MacOS, Linux, BSD or on Windows with
git installed:
code --list-extensions | xargs -L 1 echo code --install-extension
- From the command-line interface on MacOS, Linux, BSD or on Windows without
git installed:
code --list-extensions | % { "code --install-extension $_" }
or, as I think, more clearly (see also [WayBack] syntax – What does “%” (percent) do in PowerShell? – Stack Overflow):
code --list-extensions | foreach { "code --install-extension $_" }
or even more explanatory:
code --list-extensions | ForEach-Object { "code --install-extension $_" }
- From the command-line interface on Windows as a plain
cmd.exe command:
@for /f %l in ('code --list-extensions') do @echo code --install-extension %l
- On Windows as a plain
cmd.exe batch file (in a .bat/.cmd script):
@for /f %%l in ('code --list-extensions') do @echo code --install-extension %%l
- The above two on Windows can also be done using PowerShell:
PowerShell -Command "code --list-extensions | % { """""code --install-extension $_""""" }"
Note that here too, the % can be expanded into foreach or ForEach-Object for clarity.
All of the above prepend “code --install-extension ” (note the trailing space) before each installed Visual Studio Code extension.
They all give you a list like this which you can execute on any machine having Visual Studio Code installed and its code on the PATH, and a working internet connection:
code --install-extension DavidAnson.vscode-markdownlint
code --install-extension ms-vscode.powershell
code --install-extension yzhang.markdown-all-in-onex
(This is about the minimum install for me to edit markdown documents and do useful things with PowerShell).
Of course you can pipe these to a text-file script to execute them later on.
The double-quote escaping is based on [Wayback/Archive.is] How to escape PowerShell double quotes from a .bat file – Stack Overflow:
you need to escape the " on the command line, inside a double quoted string. From my testing, the only thing that seems to work is quadruple double quotes """" inside the quoted parameter:
powershell.exe -command "echo '""""X""""'"
Via: [Archive.is] how to save your visual studio code extension list – Google Search
--jeroen
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, .NET, bash, Batch-Files, CommandLine, Console (command prompt window), Development, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Software Development, Visual Studio and tools, vscode Visual Studio Code, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Development, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, WSL Windows Subsystem for Linux, xargs | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 