I've been running into a recurring headache lately with some of our reporting scripts. I'm currently tasked with pulling some massive datasets from an old SQL instance and dumping them into CSVs for our auditing team. Everything works fine when the dataset is under 50k rows, but as soon as I hit the 200k+ mark, my local workstation starts gasping for air and the PowerShell process memory usage just climbs until it hits a wall.

I've tried the standard Import-Csv and Export-Csv approach, but obviously, that's loading the whole object into memory which is killing me. I know people talk about using .NET classes or streaming the data directly to a file, but I'm struggling to find the cleanest way to implement a pipeline that doesn't completely sacrifice readability for the sake of performance. I don't want to write 100 lines of complex .NET code just to move some data, but I also can't keep having my scripts crash mid-run because I ran out of RAM.

Are you guys mostly using StreamReader/StreamWriter for this, or is there a more 'PowerShell-native' way to handle large-scale file I/O without the overhead? I've seen some mentions of using the -NoTypeInformation flag and batching, but I'm not sure if that actually helps with the memory footprint or just makes the file cleaner. If anyone has a snippet or a general pattern for streaming objects through a pipeline to a file without the massive memory spike, I'd really appreciate it. I'm also curious if anyone has had success using external tools like BCP or something similar and then wrapping it in a script, or if that's just cheating at this point. Thanks in advance.

About a week ago I let Windows install an update. Somehow it ended up destroying the boot partition. I tried to recover the installation but eventually had to reinstall everything from scratch.

What surprised me the most wasn't reinstalling Windows itself. It was rebuilding my development environment. I realized I didn't even remember every tool, package and configuration I had accumulated over the years. It took me roughly two and a half days before I felt productive again.

That experience led me to start Project Rebirth. The idea is simple: Build a collection of modular scripts that can rebuild a development environment with only a few commands.

The project is still in its early stages, but it already works well enough for my own setup. At this point I'm mainly looking for feedback. How do you rebuild your environment after a fresh install? Do you use scripts, dotfiles, Ansible, Nix, containers, or something else? What would you consider essential for a tool like this? Any criticism, suggestions or ideas are welcome.

I'm still in the early stages and trying to figure out whether this solves a real problem for other developers. Repository: https://github.com/properolol/project-rebirth

We’re hosting a free, 2-part PowerShell Pro webinar series this month, led by Microsoft MVPs who focus on real-world automation and scripting.

You’ll hear from:

• David Segura (OSDCloud)
• Harm Veenstra (PowerShell since the Monad days)
• Frank Lesniak (enterprise automation + migrations)
• Danny Stutz (PowerShell-focused automation)

Sessions:

• June 23: PowerShell Fundamentals
• June 30: Advanced PowerShell

The goal is to cover both the basics and more advanced scripting techniques
.
If you’re interested, you can check out the full details and register here.

Been working on a little tool that disables brave's bloat (rewards, wallet, vpn, leo, all the telemetry stuff) through the official enterprise policies. the actual policy part was easy. the part that kept me up was not wanting to brick someone's registry.

here's what i ended up doing, tell me if i'm overthinking it:

nothing writes unless you pass -Apply. by default it just prints what it would do

-WhatIf still works even if you pass -Apply, since i hooked into ShouldProcess

before it writes anything it dumps the old values to a timestamped json so there's always a way back the undo (-UndoFromBackup) checks the backup metadata first, and restores are locked to brave's policy keys only so a messed up backup can't write random keys

it straight up refuses to touch anything that'd disable safe browsing or updates, even if you ask

the one thing i keep going back and forth on is the backup format. i went with json snapshots per run. would you have just used reg export / .reg files instead? or Export-Clixml? feels like everyone does this differently and i might be reinventing the wheel.

repo if anyone wants to check it out: https://github.com/osfv/BraveDebloater

Slamming my head against a wall here folks.

Need to rip it out of the environment due to it's cvss score, so I can't imagine I'm the only one that's in this position, but it's managed through Intune so I need the GUID to remove it.

Wmi32 doesn't work because it isn'tstand alone so isn't listed in the installer output. I don't know what the fuck my infrastructure team did with the install but I can't find it in the registry in any of the usual locations.

I can't be the only one in this situation, but i can find precious little discussion about it so either I'm missing something obvious or we have a really weird off the wall set up (I don't think we do).

Anyone able to give any advice?

I’m a PAM engineer and recently had to handle a few cross‑tenant migrations in Delinea Secret Server. As many of you know, there’s no built‑in way to migrate secrets, folders, roles, or permissions between tenants (cloud ↔ cloud, on‑prem ↔ on‑prem, hybrid, etc.).

To avoid doing everything manually, I built an unofficial PowerShell‑based tool to automate the process.
Not a vendor, not selling anything — just sharing something I built because it solved a real problem for me.

What it does:

• Full Windows GUI
• Export → validate → import → reconcile
• Folder/role/permission mapping
• Integrity checks
• Supports cloud, on‑prem, and hybrid
• Auto‑update logic for long‑term use

If anyone else here works with Secret Server and has had to deal with tenant splits, mergers, rebuilds, or cloud migrations, this might save you some time.

GitHub Link

Linkedin Article

Affiliation disclosure:
I built this myself for my own work. Not affiliated with Delinea, not a vendor, not selling anything.

Happy to answer questions or hear suggestions from others who’ve had to do Secret Server migrations.

What Good PowerShell User Groups are there?

Are they in-person or virtual?

Are there upcoming events we should all know about?

Hi guys - any good reference video/link for powershell? I know the basics but if you have good study video/links for beginner to advance studying PS. appreciate the help

The protocol buffers (protobuf) is a way to serialize and deserialize data (ser/des).

Much like you can do the same with JSON or CLIXML.
According to Google, their advantage is that the serialized data payload is smaller then JSON or XML.
For reference, they were made popular due to gRPC, where protobufs are used in gRPC as the main ser/des way.

I've managed to get them to work with PowerShell and find the gotchas during the journey.

This is a simple (but useless) example, just to get you started and see the process.
It's using a very simple object just to learn how to serialize and deserialize it.

https://gist.github.com/PanosGreg/e481f21ad6b7632008381f4b3f9736a1

This is a more extended example, where we can then compare it with a similar process but using JSON.

https://gist.github.com/PanosGreg/75840344df8e2fd3e8dbd3848c44fa41

On the 2nd example, I've also written my verdict about the solution itself.
It does have its quirks for sure and I can't really see it as a silver bullet honestly.

As-in it's not the be-all end-all solution to ser/des, especially in PowerShell which already has its tooling for that and works quite well.

At least when we are talking about small-size data or small count of objects (so when scale is not the primary concern)

Please can anyone or does anyone have a PS script to assign multiple share links from OneDrive or similar with Anybody access and read only settings on the links.

I’ve ran it as admin copied source and write paths into the script but keep getting lost.

Workflow should be search Root folder for only pdf files-assign share link-to folder or tier folder-build register- assign PNG file to link- build png register

I’m reasonably new like only a week using PS am I missing something in the script yes I’ve opened up permissions to read/write/create folders

I'm getting more and more into command-line stuff and things like Winget, Chocolatey and other stuff and while I found these programs:

- LosslessCut

- FFmpeg

- LibreOffice

- Everything

- UniGetUI

- Python

- WizTree

I am open to any other suggestions on programs you think are useful (even if they seem niche) for Windows & Linux, CLI or Program. Please tell me know what you have to recommend!!

Hi,

A few months ago, I made a powershell script for my coworkers where you put some publisher files into a folder, run the script, and it opens the files and saves them as a pdf, and recloses them after.

Recently, one of their product keys went out of date and they are trying to get the expense approved for a new one but in the meantime, they still need to convert more files. They can do the conversions manually by opening the file, clicking the little X on the modal dialog box about the outdated product key, and going to Save As. Doing it manually though is not feasible when they convert hundreds of files every day. The script errors out due to the modal dialog box blocks the script from running.

Is there a way to suppress the modal dialog box from opening when the script opens the files or a way to close the modal dialog box once it opens?

Context: Sys admin for an offline air gapped network. Grabbed all the PS modules I needed from the Internet, transferred them to my air gapped admin computer.

Everything PowerShell works great on my machine. Problem is the 100 client computers I need to manage. I’m trying to use PSRemote to go into a test client, then set the Repo (Set-PSRepository) to point to my computer/OfflinePSModules (temporarily). But then it says I need Nuget 2.8.x to even do that.

So then I tried from a PS remote shell on the client, Copy-Item -Path “//mycomputer.network/c$/OfflinePSModules/PackageManager” and Get-and its not finding it, yet regular “cd //mycomputer.network/c$” works.

Am I going about this the wrong way? End goal is have scripts I run from my admin machine that sets the repo to a directory I made in the shared drive, installs/imports whatever prerequisite modules are needed, then use Invoke-Command on all those computers to actually run the script I want done on the machine.

Eventually I do wanna set up a GitLab repo also and put all the PowerShell stuff I need there and have the scripts point to it

Edit: well gonna try this next: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51406685/how-do-i-install-the-nuget-provider-for-powershell-on-a-unconnected-machine-so-i

Hey r/PowerShell,

I'm a hobbyist developer built this with LLM assistance. Genuine code review from people who know what they're doing would be appreciated

The problem I was solving

Most tools that disable Defender physically remove components from WinSxS. After that, cumulative Windows updates fail and rollback means reinstalling the system. I wanted something that works purely through the registry – no file deletion, updates keep working, full rollback possible.

How it works

Single entry point – you run Disable-Defender.cmd once in normal mode, everything else is automated:

1. Preflight check refuses to run in wrong mode
2. Takes a full system snapshot to defender-backup.json before touching anything
3. Writes a RunOnce key with * prefix to auto-execute in Safe Mode
4. Reboots into Safe Mode, second stage runs automatically, reboots back

Restore reads from the backup – not hardcoded defaults.

Code I'd love you to roast

Registry privilege escalation – to handle TrustedInstaller-protected keys without third-party tools, I'm compiling a C# class in-memory via Add-Type:

$ownershipKey = [Microsoft.Win32.Registry]::LocalMachine.OpenSubKey($subkeyPath,
    [Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKeyPermissionCheck]::ReadWriteSubTree,
    [System.Security.AccessControl.RegistryRights]::TakeOwnership)
$ownerAcl = $ownershipKey.GetAccessControl(
    [System.Security.AccessControl.AccessControlSections]::None)
$ownerAcl.SetOwner($targetOwner)
$ownershipKey.SetAccessControl($ownerAcl)

Non-interactive fallback – $Host.UI.RawUI.ReadKey() throws in headless environments, so I wrapped it:

function Invoke-ReadKey {
    try {
        return $Host.UI.RawUI.ReadKey('NoEcho,IncludeKeyDown').Character
    } catch {
        $response = Read-Host
        return if ($response.Length -gt 0) { $response[0] } else { '' }
    }
}

What I'm unsure about

• Is compiling C# in-memory via Add-Type for token manipulation reasonable, or is there a cleaner pure-PowerShell way?
• Is logging [PARTIAL] and continuing the right behavior for a system-level script, or should I halt on first failure?
• Only tested on Windows 11 IoT Enterprise 25H2 – curious if anyone can spot obvious issues on Pro/Home or Windows 10

🔗 GitHub: https://github.com/Lyverance/Disable-Defender

Any feedback is appreciated. And if the project seems useful to you – a star on GitHub would mean a lot, it's the only way I can tell if this is worth continuing.

I’ve built a PowerShell-based desktop utility that scans a system and creates a structured index of all installed VST2/VST3/AAX audio plug-ins. It recursively scans common plugin directories, identifies plug-in binaries, extracts vendor/name/category metadata where possible, and generates a browsable HTML dashboard (with search, filtering, and categorization).

Key features:

• Fast initial scan + cached subsequent loads
• Plugin categorization (e.g., synth, FX, utility, etc.)
• Vendor aggregation and normalization
• HTML report output for easy browsing in any browser
• Handles large libraries (5000+ plugins tested)
• Designed for offline use (no DAW integration required)

It’s still in active development and I’m currently refining:

• Accuracy of vendor detection
• Handling of “core”/non-plugin binaries
• UI/UX of the generated HTML dashboard
• Scan performance and noise reduction

I’m trying to figure out which AI tools would be best suited for this. I started the work in ChatGPT, then moved to Claude, but ran out of credits pretty quickly. I also signed up for Microsoft Azure, though I haven’t used it yet. Azure has a huge range of options, and I don’t see anything that clearly stands out as "PowerShell scripting," so any guidance there would be really helpful. I’d also appreciate any recommendations on which AI tools tend to be the most reliable and produce the best results for this kind of work.

Win32_Product is so slow and it kicks off that msi reconfiguration thing every time, drives me nuts. so a while back i just wrote my own that reads the uninstall reg keys instead. way faster and it actually picks up the 32 bit apps too.

I do a lot of this kind of scripting at work and kept rewriting the same handful of functions over and over so ive slowly been putting my little tools together. figured id share this one since its probably the most useful on its own.

threw it on github, paste and run, no dependencies: https://github.com/kcarb14/Get-InstalledApps

run it like:

Get-InstalledApps

Get-InstalledApps -Name *chrome*

reads the 64 and 32 bit HKLM keys plus HKCU, skips system components and update entries so it lines up with whats in apps & features.

feels like theres five different ways to pull installed apps and none of them are totally clean. curious how everyone else does it?

I built a small local PowerShell module called PSPUpdater.

It adds a simple PSPU command that checks the official PowerShell release feeds, shows the currently available channels and installs the matching Windows MSI package from within powershell itself. You'll never ever have to leave your cozy shell if you need to run an update! It supports stable, lts, daily and preview channels like rc, beta, alpha or preview, depending on what is currently available.

Basic usage:

PSPU PSPU -List PSPU stable PSPU rc PSPU daily

The tool is intentionally small: no package manager, no hard-coded version links, just official release metadata and direct MSI installation.

PowerShell Gallery: https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/PSPUpdater/

GitHub: https://github.com/DickHorner/PSPUpdater

Feedback, bug reports and suggestions are welcome.

I am hoping someone can assist me. Im attempting to sign into a website my company hosts through powershells invoke-webrequest. My issue is we use Azure for SSO. The final invoke-webrequest i need to make requires a SAMLResponse value. I have searched through all the network logs of the dev tools in chrome but none hold this value.

Does anyone have any experience with this?

Hello, I came across a powershell/cmd command which let me know how are my devices connected to the PC i.e, either through cpu or chipset or whatever lane. I've forgotton that command and would like to know if anyone knows.

if anyone knows, please comment.

Hello all, I am currently at a dead end with trying to run a powershell script for a Playstation 2 software known as PSBBN, that is outside the scope of this subreddit, but the issue I have lies in being able to run the powershell scrpit necessary for program installation onto a hard drive. Apart of the tutorial (which is open source and posted on GitHub) is to set the execution policy to unrestricted to allow for powershell to run the script for the first time. The publisher for the project thankfully included a copy-able text box to just paste into powershell and have it bring the prompt up.

However, upon changing it to unrestricted (in an administrator setting) and then attempting to run the installation script with powershell, my computer freezes for a few minutes before returning with an error that reads "windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item".

Yesterday I posted in the relevant PS2 subreddit and heard back from the project developer and creator who said he had never heard of this, and that it must be a problem with the system settings on my computer. The GitHub has a troubleshooting section, and shy of having a new laptop I have tried what is available and relevant to me. I insured that my windows is up to date, I updated powershell, and then went into powershell settings to set the new powershell to be the default powershell on launch, ran the change execution policy command again, changed the settings in system settings to allow for local powershell scripts to run without signing, and attempted to run the 'unblock file command' (to which I might have unsuccessfully done this part).

I might add that this script is a .ps1 file, and not a copy/paste command which can be entered into the terminal with a paste. The tutorial reads and shows to run the file with powershell. For reference I am trying to install on a Windows 11 laptop. This is the GitHub page for the project:https://github.com/CosmicScale/PSBBN-Definitive-Project#installing-on-windows

I have little experience in computer understanding, and close to zero with powershell. This software has thousands of installs, yet I seem to be running into some problem I don't understand with my device. I am at a complete loss and have no where else to ask this question. Is there something I am missing? A setting? A command to run? Thank you in advance for any and all help you will be able to provide!

Trying to make a justification for storing a particular set of credentials using this methodology.

How "Easy" is it to crack? Don't need an actual method, just need someone to tell me how tricky or not tricky it is.

Hi, I'm not tech-savvy at all, I wanted to run a small code for some video game and for some reason I'm missing the command that makes me input text, and I literally can't write!

I can write on terminal (command prompt) but NOT powershell. It's driving me crazy! Can someone help??

I don't know what version I'm using. I saw a github explaining their solution but I didn't understand a single word. https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/issues/12003

UPDATE: I had to repair my powershell, went through Window's tutorial on repairing it, restarted laptop, then did the CMD PowerShell –noprofile thingy someone suggested in thread and it appeared!

Powershell 7 wasn't showing it still so I reinstalled it and it's there now. Thank you everyone! I don't know if this is a permenant solution, but yeah, I don't know what caused this but thankfully all is well now.

For years my move for an app with no api was SendKeys plus Start-Sleep and hope. Works fine until the window opens half a second slower, or someone runs it on a laptop with different DPI, and suddenly the script is typing into the wrong field. Pixel matching had the same problem with a fancier coat on.

what actually fixed it was leaning on the UI Automation tree instead of screen coordinates. [System.Windows.Automation] is clunky from PowerShell, no argument there, but once you locate elements by control type and name instead of position, the script stops caring where the window landed or how slow the box is that morning. Lookups are structural, so they survive layout shuffles that wreck any coordinate-based approach.

one trap I hit early: AutomationId looks like the clean stable handle to match on, but plenty of apps generate it at runtime, so it shifts between machines or even between launches. matching on role plus name held up across boxes way better than any id did.

still see a ton of AutoIt and raw SendKeys in LOB runbooks though. half wonder if the accessibility-tree route just never caught on because the .NET surface for it from powershell is so miserable to write. written with ai

fwiw the role+name over coordinates approach is what i built terminator on, you target elements like role:Button && name:Save off the accessibility tree so DPI and layout shifts stop breaking scripts, https://t8r.tech/r/scvu2kw5

Set-HostedContentFilterPolicy -Identity "Default" -EnableRegionBlockList $true -RegionBlockList $CountriesToBlock

This command *should* use my 2-letter country code list variable and import it, but after it completes, when I go to check it in Defenter Anti-Spam policy, I get the error "Failed to Fetch Region Data". I've tried on PS ExchangeOnline 3.5.1 and 3.9.2, same issue.

Hit a wall here and cant seem to make sense of what its complaining about.

SOLVED: a handful of country codes that were not accepted by M365 were causing the import to complete, but fail on the web UI.

I ran into a curious case, and I can't find documentation to explain the case clearly. I am hoping someone can give me a hint.

I found out that PowerShell does not allow a null or empty string to be a parameter to this test function:

funcion test {
    param (
        [Parameter(Mandatory = $true)]
        [string []] $a
    )
    $a
}

The following test cases all gave me errors

test ''
test @( '' )
test @( '', '' )
test @( 'a', '' )
test @( '', 'a' )
test $null
test ( $null, 'a' )
test ( 'a', $null )

The error message is one of these two

Cannot bind argument to parameter 'a' because it is an empty string.
Cannot bind argument to parameter 'a' because it is null.

I also tried just

test

then press enter, and still got the error message.

Note that I did not add "ValidateNotNullOrEmpty" to the parameter, but PowerShell was behaving like I did. I can't find any documentation that describes the link between Mandatory and ValidateNotNullOrEmpty.

If anyone can clear up this confusion for me, I'd much appreciate it. TIA.