Windows Commands with Arguments in Powershell

I have been trying to write a simple PowerShell script that runs (invokes?) MySqlDump.exe for two days. PowerShell syntax for running commands with arguments is not obvious and I wasn't able to find it documented anywhere. While this case is specific to mysqldump, it can be applied to any command line executable with multiple arguments. The trick is to create an array of the arguments and use that as the second "argument" for the ampersand (&) call operator. Here's what my final example looked like:



[string]$pathToExe = "C:\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.1\bin\mysqldump.exe";
[string]$user = "myUser";
[string]$password = "myPass";
[string]$dbName = "myDB";
[Array]$arguments = "-u", $user, "--password=$password", $dbName;

& $pathToExe $arguments | Out-File -FileName "out.sql";




So there you have it. That's how to run an executable with spaces and arguments from PowerShell.

While this article from PowerShell.com didn't answer my questions, I thought it was pretty useful and relevent:

http://powershell.com/cs/blogs/ebook/archive/2009/03/30/chapter-12-command-discovery-and-scriptblocks.aspx

Changing aspnet_wp user in IIS 5.1

It's possible that no one will ever have to work with IIS 5.1 in XP again, but here you go just in case:

We needed the asp.net worker process (aspnet_wp.exe) to access a share on a remote machine. By default the "Netowrk Service" runs aspnet_wp and that user doesn't have access to remote shares. The way to change this is by changing the "processModel" attribute in your machine.config file (c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework\v2*\config\machine.config).

Mine ended up looking something like this:

<system.web>
<processModel userName="DOMAIN\username" password="password" autoConfig="true">
</processModel>
...
</system.web>


Just make sure to restart IIS for the changes to take effect.

Powershell Diff Directory

I wanted to create a file diff between two different directories. Unfortunately, the Copy-Item CmdLt will not (as far as I know) create the directory structure while copying. This is a bummer. I wanted to keep all of the files in the pipe as opposed to to getting all the files first because of the number of files in the directory structure. Here's what I cam up with



$fromDir = "C:\FromDir";
$toDir = "C:\ToDir";
$diffDir = "C:\DiffDir";


Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Path $fromDir | % {
if ((Test-Path (Join-Path -Path $toDir -ChildPath ([string]$_.FullName).Replace($fromDir, ""))) -eq $false)
{
if ((Test-Path (Join-Path -Path $diffDir -ChildPath ([string]$_.Directory).Replace($fromDir, ""))) -eq $false)
{
New-Item -Type "Directory" -Path (Join-Path -Path $diffDir -ChildPath ([string]$_.Directory).Replace($fromDir, ""));
}
Copy-Item -Recurse -Force $_.FullName -Destination (Join-Path -Path $diffDir -ChildPath ([string]$_.FullName).Replace($fromDir, ""));
}
};



As always, if anyone know a better way to do this, let me know.

Powershell Rename-Item vs Copy-Item: Changing file names to upper case

I needed recursively change all file and sub-directory names in a directory from mixed case to upper case. To me, this felt like a problem for PowerShell, but maybe I was wrong. Here was my first attempt:



Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Path "C:\media" | % {Rename-Item $_.FullName -NewName ([string]$_.Name).ToUpper()};


However, I received the following error:


Rename-Item : Source and destination path must be different.


So it looks like PowerShell refused to rename file1 to FILE1, because it thinks that they are the same file. In order to get around this I ended up copying the entire tree, and even that command isn't particularly elegant:


Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Path "C:\media" | % {Copy-Item -Force $_.FullName ([string]$_.FullName).Replace("C:\media", "C:\MEDIA2").ToUpper()};


If there is a better way to do this, I'd love to know.