> Oh yuck! I can't write a decent batch file, now how in the world am I > going to learn a totally new language like Powershell?
Ah yes, the dos/cmd batch language, perhaps the only thing more obtuse and unforgiving than sql. I always seem to fall back on <http://www.allenware.com/icsw/icswref.htm> since I can never seem to remember what exact incantation of a for loop I'm supposed to type in ;) As for powershell? Well, besides the books and links posted in the recent past on this list I think that another interesting/productive route would be to learn a little of the Perl scripting language. <http://www.activestate.com/> Powershell is *amazingly* similar to Perl, though going from Perl to Powershell is not as close as C to C++. Still, I think many would have some "aha!" moments if they did a few short sessions with Perl. Watch out though if you go this route. With Perl, it is easy to get sucked into a functional/procedural style of coding and Perl's regex implementation is addicting (Powershell has no ~=). Using regexes to modify data in the pipeline is NOT what you do in powershell. This is a mental obstacle for me to this very day, since I have a Perl background. Without discipline, Perl can also get very unstructured and hard to read. This is one area in which Powershell seriously trumps Perl and is much, much better. ~JasonG -- ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~
