Remove byte-order mark from the beginning of the file

When a file is saved with BOM (byte-order mark) on a Mac or Linux machine Windows PowerShell cannot execute the script. Unfortunately the “cat” command does not show the byte-order mark at the beginning of the file. Some editors show a question mark at the beginning of the file. I have discovered it when I …

Invoke-WebRequest : The request was aborted: Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel.

Older PowerShell versions do not use TLS1.2 as the default version during the SSL handshake. When the API requires TLS1.2 the error message appears:  Invoke-WebRequest : The request was aborted: Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel.  To force PowerShell to use TLS1.2 during the SSL handshake, issue this command before executing the Invoke-Webrequest

Set directory access in Windows

When you use SetAccessRule() to set access rights on a Windows directory, the user who will get the permission has to be a member of the Administrators group. If the user is not a member of the Administrators group PowerShell shows the error message Exception calling “SetAccessRule” with “1” argument(s): “Some or all identity references could not be …

Determine the Windows PowerShell version

To reliably display the version of the Windows PowerShell engine Open a PowerShell command window, Execute the command, $PSVersionTable.PSVersion PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> $PSVersionTable.PSVersion Major Minor Build   Revision —–   —–   ——-  ——- 5       1        16299  64 If no value is displayed, the version is 1.0, as it does not have the referenced …

Enable PowerShell execution in Windows

The default settings of Windows disable the PowerShell script execution. This protects your computer in case a malicious PowerShell script would try to make changes on your machine. The same settings prevent you from executing your own automation scripts too. When we try to execute a PowerShell script we get the error message File ….ps1 …