I recently did a tour of six West coast Microsoft offices, doing a little three-hour talk on PowerShell. At the end, as is customary, we raffled off some stuff. One of the Microsoft IT Pro Evangelists accompanying me had a unique raffle methodology: He collected everyone's evaluation forms andthrew them at me. I was supposed to snatch winners out of the air. Thanks, Harold, and I'll bill you for the therapy.
My solution - after being accosted by a ream of flying paper - was to run this in PowerShell:
1..100 | Get-Random
I replaced "100" with however many evals we actually had, and the .. range operator generated that many numbers. Get-Random then chose... well, a random one of those. I made someone else count down that many evals to find the winner.
It come me thinking about other uses of the range operator. For example, I name my DCs sequentially: DC1, DC2, and so forth. Invoking a command on them becomes easy:
Invoke-Command -script { Get-Process } -computername (
ForEach ($n in 1..10) { Write-Output "DC$n" }
)
I know, I hate ForEach - but this is a case where it's the only real solution, so I'm knuckling down and using it.
Do you know any cool tricks for the range operator?
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