Learning PowerShell – Using PowerShell Community Extensions

The PowerShell Community Extensions are a set of additional cmdlets, providers, functions and scripts which the community asked for and have been written for us to use and take advantage of.

Once you download PSCX you’ll want to add this module to something called your PowerShell Module path, this is the place you’d normally put your PowerShell Modules so that you can import them for using in your scripts. To check what your PowerShell Module path is from within PowerShell type:-

$env:PSModulePath

Add PSCX to your $env:PSModulePath so you can import it and use it anytime you start using PowerShell, to add PSCX type the following:-

$env:PSModulePath = $env:PSModulePath + “;C:\Program Files (x86)\PowerShell Community Extensions\Pscx3\;”

the last part should be where you chose to install PSCX.

Ok so no we have this added to our PowerShell Module path lets see if we can start using it.

To check what PowerShell modules are already imported type:-

Get-Module

The screen shot below shows me which modules have been imported:-

To add PSCX you need to import the module, so lets do that by typing:-

Import-Module PSCX

And that’s it we can call any of the PSCX cmdlets from our scripts, the list of which are extensive and include:-

Write-Zip
Format-XML
Get-XML
UnBlock-File

and many more

Hopefully this is enough to whet your appetite.