Object Types (PowerShell)

Datetime

The object structure: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.datetime.aspx

Improper (US) Formatting

Be aware that if you live somewhere dates are normally formatted properly (eg not the USA), then PowerShell (or probably the underlying DateTime object type as this sort of problem seems to rear its head at unexpected moments when working on Windows) has a nasty habit of returning a string formatted with day and month swapped around when coming from a script.

If you do a Get-Date it all looks fine, but then you output a DateTime object in a script to some text and its wrong. Add the .ToString() method to the end at it'll sort itself, though quite why when Powershell is converting the object into a string anyway in order to display, should the object need to be explicitly told to fix the issue, seems a bit superfluous. I obviously don't understand what the underlying bug is!

If your dates are getting mixed up, it may not be your mistake, and it may be that you've fallen fowl of the problem as well.

Formatting

To control how a DateTime is displayed you can pass it through Get-Date with the -uFormat option...

Get-Date $datetime -uFormat "%R hrs, %a %d %b %Y"

Useful formatting examples...

uFormat Specifier	Example
%R hrs, %a %d %b %Y	07:25 hrs, Fri 24 Dec 2010
%Y-%m-%d	2010-12-24

For the full list of formatting options see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.globalization.datetimeformatinfo.aspx

Or you can use the ToString method provided by the object, to convert the date. If you use a generic specifier you should get a local format output (though see note above about Improper (US) Formatting if things aren't behaving expected)...

$datetime.ToString("s")

Useful formatting examples...

ToString Method Specifier	UK-Centric Example Output
<blank>	17/02/2011 13:07:33
d	17/02/2011
D	17 February 2011
yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss	2011-02-17 13:07:33
HH:mm:ss.fff	13:07:33.423

For the full list of formatting options see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee692801.aspx, and even more detail at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.globalization.datetimeformatinfo.aspx

Converters

function ConvertLocalToUnix([datetime]$datetime)
{ 
    ($datetime.ToUniversalTime() - ([datetime]'1/1/1970 00:00:00')).TotalSeconds
}

function ConvertUnixtoLocal($sincepoch)
{
    [timezone]::CurrentTimeZone.ToLocalTime(([datetime]'1/1/1970').AddSeconds($sincepoch))
}

IP Address

The object structure: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.ipaddress

To create an IP address object...

$ip = [System.Net.IPAddress]::Parse("192.168.1.123")

To confirm a supplied address is valid...

if ( [System.Net.IPAddress]::TryParse($IP2test) ) {
    Write-Host "$IP2test is a valid address"
}