Often I find myself needing to check input for a valid IP Address. Regex is a common way to solve this, but here is a MUCH simpler way. The IPAddress .Net method is easier and much more straight-forward.
I used this recently to extract IP addresses from a logfile.
1 2 3 4 | IF ( [BOOL]($LineArray[3] -as [IPADDRESS]) ) { ## OPEN IF - Check IF $LineArray[3] is IP $LineClientIP = $LineArray[3] } ## OPEN IF - Check IF $LineArray[3] is IP |
Often I have requirements to change a password somewhere using a Powershell script and am required to enter it at run time. At this point, one has an option: include the password in a log file or not. I figured it would be good to have it in the log file (the script is run on a trusted box), but plain text isn’t best. How to do this?
That’s when I thought of base64.
Here’s Powershell code to perform these actions:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 | Param ( [string] $Password, [switch] $Encode, [switch] $DeCode ) IF ($Encode) { ## Display & Log Base64 Encoded password $Encoded = [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes($Password) $EncodedPassword = [System.Convert]::ToBase64String($Encoded) } IF ($DeCode) { ## Display & Log Base64 Decoded password $Decoded = [System.Convert]::FromBase64String($Password); $DecodedPassword = [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetString($Decoded ); Write-Output "Password ($Password) Base64 decoded is $DecodedPassword " } |
One of the fun things about working with “programming” (I use the term loosely when it comes to scripting, for I am not a programmer), is figuring out how to do things that the scripting “rules” often prevents.
One of these issues is dealing with UNC paths and Powershell confusing it with a regular expression, aka RegEx, statement. Powershell interprets a backslash (“\”) as a RegExstatement, so it has to be “escaped” before working with the backslashes. A similar issue is encountered when working with a local path (see example 5).
1. Extract the server name from a UNC path
$SharePath = “\\metcorpfs1.metcorp.org\Share1″
[regex]::match(“$SharePath”,’[^\\]+’).value
The result of running this is “metcorpfs1.metcorp.org”
2. Replace the server in a UNC path (or any text string)
This is the tricky part since Powershell interprets the backslash character “\” as a regular expression (regex). The way to deal with this is to escape regex.
$OldServer = “metcorpfs1″
$NewServer = “metcorpfs3″
$SharePath = “\\metcorpfs1.metcorp.org\Share1″
$NewSharePath = $SharePath -Replace ([regex]::Escape(“$OldServer”),”$NewServer”)
$NewSharePath
3. Split the UNC path into each part
[string]$UNCSharePath = “\\metcorpfs1.metcorp.org\Share1\PathRoot\PathParent\PathChild”
[array]$UNCSharePathArray = $UNCSharePath -Split [regex]::Escape(‘\’)
[array]$UNCSharePathArray
Note that the first 2 array entries ([0] & [1]) are blank.
4. Get the parent path for a local or UNC file
$LocalPath = “c:\Temp\scripts\Test.ps1″
$UNCPath = “\\metcorpfs1\Scripts\Test.ps1″
$LocalPathParentFolder = split-path $LocalPath -Parent
$LocalPathParentFolder
$UNCPathParentFolder = split-path $LocalPath -Parent
$UNCPathParentFolder
5. Split the local path into each part
$LocalPath = “c:\Temp\scripts\Test.ps1″
[array]$LocalPathArray = $LocalPath -Split [regex]::Escape(‘\’)
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