Searching for files remotely

We are looking to possibly centralize the management of our OPT files. Thought maybe a quick script in PowerShell would do the trick. Ran the following line:

Get-childitem \\server1-vp01\c$ -Include *.opt -Recurse

and waited, waited, waited...... 6 minutes later the console displayed my results.

Knowing a little bit about WMI, I decided to approach this from a different angle:

Get-WmiObject `
-class CIM_DATAFile `
-computername 'server-vp01' `
-filter "extension='opt' and drive='c:'"

This gave me back the results in 2.73 seconds!

Comparing the times generated the following:

measure-command {`
get-childitem \\server-vp01\c$ `
-Include *.opt `
-Recurse}

Days              : 0
Hours             : 0
Minutes           : 6
Seconds           : 3
Milliseconds      : 476
Ticks             : 3634762131
TotalDays         : 0.00420690061458333
TotalHours        : 0.10096561475
TotalMinutes      : 6.057936885
TotalSeconds      : 363.4762131
TotalMilliseconds : 363476.2131

measure-command {`
Get-WmiObject `
-class CIM_DATAFile `
-computername 'server-vp01' `
-filter "extension='opt' and drive='c:'"}

Days              : 0
Hours             : 0
Minutes           : 0
Seconds           : 2
Milliseconds      : 739
Ticks             : 27390035
TotalDays         : 3.17014293981481E-05
TotalHours        : 0.000760834305555556
TotalMinutes      : 0.0456500583333333
TotalSeconds      : 2.7390035
TotalMilliseconds : 2739.0035

Pretty obvious which method to use.
Once again, PowerShell and WMI save the day.

PowerShell Formatting Error

I was looking throught the PowerGUI forum yesterday when I saw a post similar to this:

$processes = Get-Process -name m*
$drives = Get-Wmiobject `
-class win32_logicaldisk `
-Filter "DriveType=3"

$processes
$driveinfo | Format-Table -autosize

When you run this code in an editor, you are likely to get the following error:

out-lineoutput : Object of type "Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.Internal.Format.FormatStartData" is not legal or not in the correct sequence. This is likely caused by a user-specified "format-tabl e" command which is conflicting with the default formatting.

After a few minutes of research, I see that this has been registered on Microsoft Connect as a bug. A quick, easy fix is to pass the $processes object down the pipline to Out-Default. ( $processes | Out-Default )

Hope this helps!