TOPIC: START
Using PowerShell to reinstall Windows Apps
9th September 2016Recently, I managed to use 10AppsManager to remove most of the in-built apps from a Windows 10 virtual machine that I have for testing development versions in case anything ugly were to appear in a production update. Curiosity is my excuse for letting the tool do what it did and some could do with restoration. Out of the lot, Windows Store is the main one that I have sorted so far.
The first step of the process was to start up PowerShell in administrator mode. On my system, this is as simple as clicking on the relevant item in the menu popped up by right-clicking on the Start Menu button and clicking on the Yes button in the dialogue box that appears afterwards. In your case, it might be a case of right-clicking on the appropriate Start Menu programs entry, selecting the administrator option and going from there.
With this PowerShell session open, the first command to issue is the following:
Get-Appxpackage -Allusers > c:\temp\appxpackage.txt
This creates a listing of Windows app information and pops it into a text file in your choice of directory. Opening the text file in Notepad allows you to search it more easily, and there is an entry for Windows Store:
Name : Microsoft.WindowsStore
Publisher : CN=Microsoft Corporation, O=Microsoft Corporation, L=Redmond, S=Washington, C=US
Architecture : X64
ResourceId :
Version : 11607.1001.32.0
PackageFullName : Microsoft.WindowsStore_11607.1001.32.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe
InstallLocation : C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\Microsoft.WindowsStore_11607.1001.32.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe
IsFramework : False
PackageFamilyName : Microsoft.WindowsStore_8wekyb3d8bbwe
PublisherId : 8wekyb3d8bbwe
PackageUserInformation : {S-1-5-21-3224249330-198124288-2558179248-1001
IsResourcePackage : False
IsBundle : False
IsDevelopmentMode : False
Dependencies : {Microsoft.VCLibs.140.00_14.0.24123.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe,
Microsoft.NET.Native.Framework.1.3_1.3.24201.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe,
Microsoft.NET.Native.Runtime.1.3_1.3.23901.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe,
Microsoft.WindowsStore_11607.1001.32.0_neutral_split.scale-100_8wekyb3d8bbwe}Using the information from the InstallLocation field, the following command can be built and executed (here, it has gone over several lines, so you need to get your version onto a single one):
Add-AppxPackage -register "C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\Microsoft.WindowsStore_11607.1001.32.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe\AppxManifest.xml" -DisableDevelopmentMode
Once the above has completed, the app was installed and ready to use again. As the mood took me, I installed other apps from the Windows Store as I saw fit.
Changing file timestamps using Windows PowerShell
29th October 2014Recently, a timestamp got changed on an otherwise unaltered file on me and I needed to change it back. Luckily, I found an answer on the web that used PowerShell to do what I needed, and I am recording it here for future reference. The possible commands are below:
$(Get-Item temp.txt).creationtime=$(Get-Date "27/10/2014 04:20 pm")
$(Get-Item temp.txt).lastwritetime=$(Get-Date "27/10/2014 04:20 pm")
$(Get-Item temp.txt).lastaccesstime=$(Get-Date "27/10/2014 04:20 pm")
The first of these did not interest me, since I wanted to leave the file creation date as it was. The last write and access times were another matter because these needed altering. The Get-Item commandlet brings up the file, so its properties can be set. Here, these include creationtime, lastwritetime and lastaccesstime. The Get-Date commandlet reads in the provided date and time for use in the timestamp assignment. While PowerShell itself is case-insensitive, I have opted to show the camel case that is produced when you are tabbing through command options for the sake of clarity.
The Get-Item and Get-Date have aliases of gi and gd, respectively, and the Get-Alias commandlet will show you a full list while Get-Command (gcm) gives you a list of commandlets. Issuing the following gets you a formatted list that is sent to a text file:
gcm | Format-List > temp2.txt
There is some online help, but it is not quite as helpful as it ought to be, so I have popped over to Microsoft Learn whenever I needed extra enlightenment. Here is a command that pops the full thing into a text file:
Get-Help Format-List -full > temp3.txt
In fact, getting a book might be the best way to find your way around PowerShell because of all its commandlets and available objects.
For now, other commands that I have found useful include the following:
Get-Service | Format-List
New-Item -Name test.txt -ItemType "file"
The first of these gets you a list of services, while the second creates a new blank text file for you, and it can create new folders for you too. Other useful commandlets are below:
Get-Location (gl)
Set-Location (sl)
Copy-Item
Remove-Item
Move-Item
Rename-Item
The first of the above is like the cwd or pwd commands that you may have seen elsewhere, in that the current directory location is given. Then, the second will change your directory location for you. After that, there are commandlets for copying, deleting, moving and renaming files. These also have aliases, so users of the legacy Windows command line or a UNIX or Linux shell can use something that is familiar to them.
Little fixes like the one with which I started this piece are all good to know, but it is in scripting that PowerShell really is said to show its uses. Having seen the usefulness of such things in the world on Linux and UNIX, I cannot disagree with that, and PowerShell has its own IDE too. That may be just as well, given how much there is to learn. That especially is the case when you might need to issue the following command in a PowerShell session opened using the Run as Administrator option just to get the execution as you need it:
Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
Issuing Get-ExecutionPolicy will show you if this is needed when the response is: Restricted. A response of RemoteSigned shows you that all is in order, though you need to check that any script you then run has no nasty payload in there, which is why execution is restrictive in the first place. This sort of thing is yet another lesson to be learnt with PowerShell.
Suppressing Update Notifier messages in Ubuntu GNOME 14.04
18th July 2014Even though I use only the command line for system updates, I still received system restart messages after kernel updates. Though these can be helpful, I prefer to restart my system on my own schedule, especially when running processes I don't want to interrupt.
In Ubuntu GNOME 13.10 and earlier, these messages didn't appear. I wanted to return to a notification-free experience. The Update Notifier application causes these messages, but removing it significantly impacts the system, making that approach impractical.
The application starts automatically at boot but doesn't appear in Startup Applications Preferences (launched via gnome-session-properties). This is because the NoDisplay flag in its autostart shortcut located in /etc/xdg/autostart/ is set to true. To make it visible, you need to set this flag to false.
The following command will reveal all hidden startup applications (note that the command is split across two lines for display purposes, and you may need to adjust quotes when executing it):
sudo sed -i 's/NoDisplay=true/NoDisplay=false/g'
/etc/xdg/autostart/*.desktop
The sed command changes NoDisplay=true to NoDisplay=false in all desktop files, revealing hidden entries in Startup Applications Preferences. This allows you to disable the Update Notifier. While deleting the desktop file would be more permanent, this solution works well as it stops restart notifications. Since I regularly update my system and shut down daily, updates are applied automatically, and everything functions properly.
Shell swapping in Windows: PowerShell and the legacy command prompt
28th April 2010Until the advent of PowerShell, Windows had been the poor relation when it came to working from the command line when compared with UNIX, Linux and so on. A recent bit of fiddling had me trying to run FTP from the legacy command prompt when I ran into problems with UNC address resolution (it's unsupported by the old technology) and mapping of network drives. It turned out that my error 85 was being caused by an unavailable drive letter that the net use command didn't reveal as being in use. Reassuringly, this wasn't a Vista issue that I couldn't circumvent.
During this spot of debugging, I tried running batch files in PowerShell and discovered that you cannot run them there like you would from the old command prompt. In fact, you need a line like the following:
cmd /c script.bat
In other words, you have to call cmd.exe like perl.exe, wscript.exe and cscript.exe for batch files to execute. If I had time, I might have got to exploring the use ps1 files for setting up PowerShell commandlets, but that is something that needs to wait until another time. What I discovered though is that UNC addressing can be used with PowerShell without the need for drive letter mappings, not a bad development at all. While on the subject of discoveries, I discovered that the following command opens up a command prompt shell from PowerShell without any need to resort to the Start Menu:
cmd /k
Entering the exit command returns you to the PowerShell command line again, and entering cmd /? reveals the available options for the command, so you need never be constrained by your own knowledge or its limitations.