Creating a record of all your powershell commands

You can create a transcript of everything you do in powershell via "Start-Transcript"

It will return output such as:

> start-transcript
Transcript started, output file is C:\Users\Jack\Documents\PowerShell_transcript.20160526143256.txt

The file will contain every command you type.

And when you're done, stop recording with

> stop-transcript
Transcript stopped, output file is C:\Users\Jack\Documents\PowerShell_transcript.20160526143256.txt

And if you try to Get-Content of that file, before stopping the recording, it will open a wormhole in space and time, and the output becomes the input.

Get-Content C:\Users\Jack\Documents\PowerShell_transcript.20160526143256.txt

...until your hard drive is full, or some other resources is exhausted.

To do all of this in one line try the following:

stop-transcript; start-transcript | % { $tfile = $_.Replace("Transcript started, output file is ","") }; cat $tfile; stop-transcript

To get the location of the current or most recent transcript file:

function Get-TranscriptFilePath {
  try {
    $externalHost = $host.gettype().getproperty("ExternalHost",[reflection.bindingflags]"nonpublic,instance").getvalue($host, @())
    $externalHost.gettype().getfield("transcriptFileName", "nonpublic,instance").getvalue($externalHost)
  } catch {
    Write-Warning "This host does not support transcription."
  }
}

...allegedly. Though so far that only works on half my machines.

Creating a record of all your powershell commands

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