Powershell makes so many things easier than before it existed. At least for me. I’m not a programmer but simple commands piped one to another, like bash in Linux, I can get a lot done.
One of the “things” I need to get done is checking how many computers got a program installed. Because of the environment I’m in and the program itself, there’s no GPO based install for an MSI and there’s no third party tool based install. This stumped me for a while until I came up with the idea of using a startup script for the install.
Another challenge, powershell scripting is disabled. However I learned from “PowerShell Security” by Michael Pietroforte and Wolfgang Sommergut that powershell can be called within a .bat using Powershell Invoke-Command -ScriptBlock {} even if powershell is disabled by policy. So I wrote a start up script that relied on .bat files that had Powershell Invoke-Command -ScriptBlock {} in them to run the program install. The -ScriptBlock {} checked first if the dependencies were installed, installed them if not, then checked if the desired program was installed and installed it if not. It also wrote a log file for each pc named as “progname_<hostname>.txt” and appended to the file with each restart.
The startup script wasn’t running reliably every time a pc booted. Seemed to be NIC initialization or network initialization related. In any case, the pcs that were to be installed were listed in an AD group. The pcs that had run the startup script output that info into a file named “progname_<hostname>.txt”. One way to see which of the pcs had not gotten the install was by comparing the members of the AD group, the computer names, to the <hostname> portion of the log file names that were being created. Computers from the group without a corresponding file hadn’t gotten installed.
Easy, right? Get the list of computers to install with Get-ADGroupMember and compare that list to the <hostname> portion of the log files. How to get only the <hostname> portion? Get-ChildItem makes it easy to get the list of file names. But then need to parse it to get only the <hostname> part. Simple in a spreadsheet but I really wanted to get a listing of only the <hostname> without having to take any other steps.
I knew I needed to look at the Name portion of the file name, handle it as a string, chop off the “progname_”, and drop the “.txt” portion. But how to do that? After what seemed like way to much searching and experimenting I finally came up with…
$( Foreach ( $name in $(Get-ChildItem progname* -Name) ) { $name.split('_')[1].split('.')[0] } ) | SortThe first .split('_')[1] lops off the common part of the filename that’s there only to identify the program the log is being created for, “progname_”, and keeps the rest for the second split(). The next split(), .split('.')[0], cuts off the file extension, .txt, and keeps only the part that precedes it. And so the output is only the hostname portion of the filename that the startup script has created.
Compare that list to the list from Get-ADGroupMember and, voila, I know which of the targeted pcs have and have not had the program installed without doing any extra processing to trim the file names. Simple enough, but for some reason it took me a while to see how to handle the file names as strings and parse them the way I needed.