T-SQL Tuesday #127 – Non SQL Tips and Tricks

Words: 412

Time to read: ~ 2 minutes.

T-SQL Tuesday time! This month we have Kenneth Fisher ( blog | twitter ) as the host and he’s asking us for our non-SQL related tips and tricks.

Short…

I will confess to only starting this post late. So my tips and tricks will not be well thought out or planned. They will involve PowerShell though, something that I think about daily.

What we know

I consider it to be common knowledge that you can open up PowerShell from the explorer.

By default, my PowerShell opens up to “C:\Users\Shane”.

But by typing “PowerShell” into the location bar of an explorer, you can open a PowerShell session.

The PowerShell session will open to the location the explorer was open.

Et Viola

Reverse it

Did you know that you can drag and drop onto a PowerShell console?

Let’s create an empty text file.

New-Item -Name TestEmptyFile.txt -ItemType File

And we can see that it shows up in the open explorer location.

If we were to drag and drop the file into our PowerShell console window, it will return the full path to that file

Learn from History

If you spend a lot of time in a PowerShell console, it’s not rash to presume that you’re going to be running some of the same commands over and over again.

That’s where PowerShell’s history comes into play.

By using the command Get-History or even its alias h , you can see the commands that you’ve run before:

#Hashtag

Claudio Silva ( blog | twitter ) mentions in his T-SQL Tuesday post about using PSReadline’s HistorySearchBackward and HistorySearchForward.

I’ve fallen into the habit of using #.

Get-History returns an Id that we can use with our #. On our PowerShell console, if we want to run the 2nd command in our history, we only need to type #2 and then press Tab.

If we don’t know the Id but know a word, phrase, or substring of the command we can use #<word | phrase | substring of the command> to look through our history for the command.

So to find the command Get-History that we ran, we can use #Hist and then press Tab.

If it’s still not the right command, we can keep pressing Tab until we find the previous command that we’re looking for.

..but Sweet

I’m pretty sure I haven’t blown your socks off in amazement with these tips and tricks. But they work, they’re semi-useful, and they should be helpful.

I hope you knock some use out of them.