In PowerShell it can be useful to be working directly with .Net classes and runspaces. The disadvantage is that Get-Help is not available to help you explore the possible values that can be entered. Although MSDN is a great reference for .Net runspaces and classes it can be very useful to know how to get the values of an enumeration without accessing MSDN.
For example when capturing a single key press the $host variable can be used, specifically the ReadKey method. In order to display the overload definitions I will execute the method without the including the parentheses brackets:
PS> $host.UI.RawUI.ReadKey OverloadDefinitions ------------------- System.Management.Automation.Host.KeyInfo ReadKey(System.Management.Automation.Host.ReadKeyOptions options) System.Management.Automation.Host.KeyInfo ReadKey() |
So now it would be good to know what the possible values for System.Management.Automation.Host.ReadKeyOptions enumeration are. To find out what the possible values are the GetNames method of the [System.Enum] Class can be used in the following way:
PS> [System.Enum]::GetNames([System.Management.Automation.Host.ReadKeyOptions]) AllowCtrlC NoEcho IncludeKeyDown IncludeKeyUp |
Knowing how to find information like this in PowerShell provides you with the tools to be able to troubleshoot and improve your scripts. In the next Quicktip on Thursday I will show how the $host.UI.RawUI.ReadKey method can be used to get grab a single key press from the PowerShell console.
