powershell-windows

PowerShell — Windows Automation Mastery

Mandatory Pre-Flight Context Inspection

Before reading, generating, or refactoring code in the powershell-windows domain, inspect these 5 critical parameters:

1. System Boundaries & Dependencies: Verify that all required dependencies exist in target package manifests and environment paths.
2. Runtime Context & Platform Invariants: Confirm target platform constraints (Node.js, Browser, Mobile OS, Edge runtime) before applying APIs.
3. Execution Guardrails: Identify potential side-effects, state mutations, and unhandled asynchronous exceptions.
4. Validation & Type Contracts: Validate input data schemas and strict type constraints across all module interfaces.
5. Observability & Proof of Execution: Ensure execution produces tangible verification signals (terminal output, tests, metrics).

Activation Boundaries

• Activate when: Use when configuring, automating, deploying, and debugging powershell windows pipelines, containers, servers, and cloud infrastructure.
• DO NOT activate when: The task falls outside the powershell-windows domain or is managed by a different dedicated specialist agent.

🔁 Multi-Pass Execution Protocol

🛠️ Technical Architecture & Reference Recipes

1. The Object Pipeline

Unlike Bash where everything is strings (requiring awk/grep), PowerShell passes structured .NET class instances between commands.

# ❌ BAD: Attempting to treat PowerShell like Bash (String Parsing)
Get-Process | Out-String -Stream | Select-String "node" | ForEach-Object { $id = ($_ -split '\s+')[8]; Stop-Process -Id $id }

# ✅ GOOD: Accessing Object Properties Directly
Get-Process -Name "node" | Stop-Process -Force

# Filtering objects (Where-Object)
Get-Service | Where-Object Status -eq 'Running' | Select-Object Name, DisplayName

# Accessing methods natively on the object
$files = Get-ChildItem -Path "C:\logs" -Filter "*.log"
$files | ForEach-Object { $_.Delete() }

2. Strict Error Handling (The Windows equivalent of set -e)

By default, PowerShell prints an error but keeps running. You MUST enforce strict halting for automation scripts.

# Mandatory header for reliable automation scripts
$ErrorActionPreference = "Stop"
Set-StrictMode -Version Latest

try {
    # If this fails, it jumps straight to catch block instead of continuing
    Copy-Item "C:\Source\configs.json" -Destination "C:\Dest\"

    $config = Get-Content "C:\Dest\configs.json" | ConvertFrom-Json
} catch {
    Write-Error "Deployment failed during config copy: $_"
    exit 1
} finally {
    # Cleanup block executes regardless of success or failure
    Remove-Item "C:\Dest\temp" -Recurse -ErrorAction Ignore
}

3. Execution Policies & Execution

Windows restricts running .ps1 files by default for security.

# Temporarily bypass the policy for a single script execution (CI/CD pattern)
powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\Deploy-App.ps1

# ❌ HALLUCINATION TRAP: Do NOT instruct users to run `Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted`
# This lowers the permanent security posture of the entire operating system.
# Use Bypass only at the process level.

4. Manipulating Structured Formats Natively

Because PowerShell is built on .NET, parsing JSON, XML, and CSV is native.

# JSON
$config = Get-Content .\appsettings.json | ConvertFrom-Json
$config.Database.ConnectionString = "Server=Prod;"
$config | ConvertTo-Json -Depth 10 | Set-Content .\appsettings.json

# CSV (No AWK needed)
$users = Import-Csv .\users.csv
$users | Where-Object Role -eq "Admin" | Export-Csv .\admins.csv -NoTypeInformation

# API Requests (Invoke-RestMethod automatically parses JSON into PowerShell objects)
$response = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri "https://api.github.com/users/github"
Write-Host "GitHub has $($response.public_repos) public repositories."

5. Providers and Drives

PowerShell extends the "file system" concept to the Registry, Environment Variables, and Certificates.

# Environment variables (Env: drive)
$env:PATH += ";C:\Custom\Bin"
Write-Host $env:COMPUTERNAME

# Registry (HKCU: and HKLM: drives)
Get-ChildItem -Path "HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run"

# Certificates (Cert: drive)
Get-ChildItem -Path "Cert:\LocalMachine\My" | Where-Object Subject -match "example.com"

🚨 Edge-Case & Failure Mode Matrix

🤖 LLM-Specific Traps Table

🏛️ Tribunal Verification & Guardrails

Active Reviewers: pipeline-reviewer · devops-engineer · resilience-reviewer Slash Command: /review or /tribunal-full

🔬 Evidence Standard (Tri-State Verification)

Every finding, audit statement, or completion claim must classify its factual certainty:

• [OBSERVED]: Directly confirmed in the codebase or verified via executed terminal command.
• [INFERRED]: Logically deduced from code patterns, architectural data flow, or schema relations.
• [UNVERIFIED]: Speculative hypothesis or runtime possibility requiring active testing or measurement.

✅ Pre-Flight Self-Audit Checklist

✅ Are strict execution modes (set -euo pipefail) active on all scripts?
✅ Are container images pinned to immutable digest/SHA tags instead of "latest"?
✅ Are deployment health checks, liveness probes, and rollback baselines configured?
✅ Are CI secrets masked and unexposed to untrusted pull requests?
✅ Did I verify environment compatibility across target runtimes?

🛑 Verification-Before-Completion (VBC) Protocol

CRITICAL: You must follow a strict "evidence-based closeout" state machine.

• ❌ Forbidden: Declaring a task complete because the output "looks correct."
• ✅ Required: You are explicitly forbidden from finalizing any task without providing concrete evidence (terminal output, passing test suites, compiler success, or equivalent operational proof) that your output works as intended.