My Latest PowerShell Book - Copies Available

 

After a long development process, my latest PowerShell book has been published by Wiley

This book began before the Covid pandemic began and progress as a result of the virus was a lot slower than I would have liked, but thanks to some great people we got it done and this week I got my review copies.

As I announced on my Twitter (@DoctorDNS) feed, I have some copies of this book to give away. I am more than happy sign and send off copies of the physical book. I also want to find some reviewers and can provide them with an electronic copy for review if you contact me offline. 

I love the PowerShell community and nothing would please me more than to give a copy to anyone who asks. But that is not possible. So I am happy to give away some free copies, but to make it a bit more interesting, there is a little catch! :-)

 I will give away five signed copies of the physical book to the first FIVE people who ask and who donate to the Epilepsy Society (https://epilepsysociety.org.uk/). My daughter has severe epilepsy and I support this charity. So to get a copy, confirm a donation and EMAIL me. My email addresses DoctorDNS@Gmail.Com.

. 

[LATER]

Owing to Covid restrictions announced today in the UK, physical copies may be delayed until I can get out to the Post Office. 

How To: Change the File Time for a Windows File

When using PowerShell in Windows, The Get-ChildItem (and other cmdlets) return objects of the type System.IO.FileInfo for files in the NTFS File system. Each of the returned objects contains six date/time objects:

• CreationTime and CreationTimeUtc - the date/time that the file was created (in local time and UTC)
• LastAccessTime and LastAccessTimeUtc - the date/time that the file was last accessed
• LastWriteTime and LastWriteTimeUtc - the date/time that the file was last written

These properties allow you to check a file (or for that matter a folder) for when it was created and when it was last written to and read from. This is very useful to help IT Professionals to discover files that are underused and may be candidates for deletion. To cater for files being accessed in different time zones, the UTC variants provide time-zone proof times for comparison.

One challenge is that you may wish to change these times. There is no cmdlet that can change these times directly. Fortunately, there is a simple bit of PowerShell magic. Assume you have a file for which you wish to change date/times. 

Here is you can do it:

PSH [C:\Foo]: Remove-Item -Path C:\Foo\Foo.xxx -ea 0  

PSH [C:\Foo]: "FOO" | Out-File -Path C:\Foo\Foo.xxx

PSH [C:\Foo]: #    Find file and display

PSH [C:\Foo]: $File = Get-ChildItem -Path c:\foo\Foo.xxx

PSH [C:\Foo]: $File| Format-List -Property name,*time*

Name              : Foo.xxx

CreationTime      : 11/12/2020 10:09:57

LastAccessTime    : 11/12/2020 10:09:57

LastAccessTimeUtc : 11/12/2020 10:09:57

LastWriteTime     : 11/12/2020 10:09:57

LastWriteTimeUtc  : 11/12/2020 10:09:57

PSH [C:\Foo]: #    Get new date

PSH [C:\Foo]: $NewDate = Get-Date -Date '14/08/1950'

PSH [C:\Foo]: #    Change the date

PSH [C:\Foo]: $File.CreationTime      = $NewDate

PSH [C:\Foo]: $File.CreationTimeUTC   = $NewDate

PSH [C:\Foo]: $File.LastAccessTime    = $NewDate

PSH [C:\Foo]: $File.LastACcessTimeUTC = $NewDate

PSH [C:\Foo]: $File.LastWriteTime     = $NewDate

PSH [C:\Foo]: $File.LastWriteTimeUTC  = $NewDate

PSH [C:\Foo]: #    Recheck file to see changed date/time

PSH [C:\Foo]: $File = Get-ChildItem -Path C:\Foo\Foo.xxx

PSH [C:\Foo]: $File| Format-List -Property Name,*Time*

Name              : Foo.xxx

CreationTime      : 14/08/1950 01:00:00

CreationTimeUtc   : 14/08/1950 00:00:00

LastAccessTime    : 14/08/1950 01:00:00

LastAccessTimeUtc : 14/08/1950 00:00:00

LastWriteTime     : 14/08/1950 01:00:00

LastWriteTimeUtc  : 14/08/1950 00:00:00