Chapter 24. Additional random tips, tricks, and techniques
We’re nearing the end of your “month of lunches,” and the next chapter is your final exam, where you’ll tackle a complete administrative task from scratch. Before you do, I’d like to share a few extra tips and techniques to round out your education.
Every PowerShell session starts out the same: the same aliases, the same PSDrives, the same colors, and so forth. Why not make the shell a little bit more customized?
I’ve explained before that there’s a difference between a PowerShell hosting application and the PowerShell engine itself. A hosting application, such as the console or the PowerShell ISE, is a way for you to send commands to the actual PowerShell engine. The engine executes your commands, and the hosting application is responsible for displaying the results. Another thing that the hosting application is responsible for doing is loading and running profile scripts each time the shell starts.
These profile scripts can be used to customize the PowerShell environment, by loading snap-ins or modules, changing to a different starting directory, defining functions that you’ll want to use, and so forth. For example, here’s the profile script that I use on my computer.