Get-VM is the first PowerCLI cmdlet everyone learns and the one most inventory reports are built on. Piping it into Select-Object and Export-Csv produces a spreadsheet in about ten seconds, which is why so many estates have one. The trouble…
esxcli is the primary command set on an ESXi host. Almost every configuration and diagnostic action that has a command-line form lives under it, and unlike the older vim-cmd and esxcfg- tools, it has one consistent grammar and a machine-readable…
powercfg.exe is the command-line front end for the Windows power subsystem. It reads and writes power plans, reports which sleep states the firmware actually offers, names the process that is keeping a machine awake, and generates the battery, energy and…
Test-NetConnection is the built-in PowerShell cmdlet that answers the three questions a sysadmin asks when something on the network stops working: can I reach the host at all, is the TCP port actually open, and which path does the traffic…
Administrator rights do not grant access to a file. They grant the ability to take ownership of it, and ownership is what lets you rewrite the permissions. That distinction is the whole reason takeown exists, and it is why “I…
schtasks is the command line interface to the Windows Task Scheduler. It creates, queries, runs, stops and deletes scheduled tasks, on the local machine or on a remote one, without opening the console. Everything the GUI can do, it can…
How to use sc.exe to query, configure and control Windows services from the command line: start types, recovery actions, dependencies and remote servers.
Resolve a PID to a real process with tasklist, filter by service, session or memory, and end it cleanly with taskkill - including process trees and remote hosts.
Use quser, qwinsta and rwinsta to list RDP sessions on a Windows server, spot disconnected ones blocking new logons, and log them off from the command line.
You need to find every disabled user account in the Sales OU, and you are logged on to a Server Core box where the ActiveDirectory PowerShell module is not installed. You could install RSAT, or RDP somewhere else, or run…
