Professional Windows® PowerShell

Chapter 8. Using Trusting Operations

Tools such as Windows PowerShell provide tremendous power. But at the same time, one potentially terrifying thing about Windows PowerShell is that its power makes it potentially more destructive if you do something wrong. Imagine that you want to delete some files or stop some processes or services depending on the value returned by an expression. You really need to be sure of what you are doing, don't you? You don't want to end up deleting some crucial files on which your company depends just because you made a mistake in the syntax on the command line or in a Windows PowerShell script.

The Windows PowerShell designers have that base covered by providing several options to use with cmdlets that let you check the effects of what you plan to do. I describe these options in this chapter.

There are three parameters available for use with many, but not all, Windows PowerShell cmdlets that allow you to anticipate exactly what a command will do or monitor what a command has done. The cmdlets that lack these parameters cannot change system state. The parameters are:

• whatif — Allows you to see what a command would have done without actually executing the command

• confirm — Allows you to see the individual actions a command would have taken and allows you to confirm or cancel each action

• verbose — Allows you to see in detail what you have done

Some of the ...