If you have a Portable Document Format (PDF) file and wish to determine the version of the PDF standard used for the document, that information is stored in the first line of the file. You can open the file with a text editor, such as the Windows Notepad application on a Microsoft Windows system and view the first line to determine the PDF version used for the file. You will see %PDF-x.y where x.y is the version of the PDF standard used in the creation of the file, e.g., %PDF-1.7 for version 1.7.

On a Microsoft Windows system, you could also open a PowerShell window (you can type PowerShell in the Windows Search field and click on the application when you see it returned in the list of results) and use the Get-Content cmdlet and the -First parameter followed by the number one. E.g.:

PS C:\> Get-Content "July 2024 Newsletter.pdf" -First 1
%PDF-1.7
PS C:\>

Related:

1. PowerShell Get-Content equivalents to Linux head and tail commands
   Date: March 22, 2024

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I added two Western Digital 10 TB hard disk drives to a Windows 11 system. I wanted to have the second hard disk drive (HDD) mirror the first, which is a Redundant Array of Independent Disks 1 (RAID 1) configuration. You can configure Windows to mirror the drives using the Disk Management utility that comes with the Microsoft Windows operating system. To run the utility, you can open a command prompt with administrator privileges and then type diskmgmt.msc and hit Enter. You will then see a window showing all the drives attached to the system. In this case, the new 10 TB drives are shown as "unallocated", since they have not been partitioned and formatted yet.

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If a Microsoft Windows system is running the Microsoft Defender Firewall, firewall software that comes with Microsoft Windows systems, you can check on whether connectivity is allowed on a particular network port from a command-line interface (CLI) using PowerShell. You can determine whether the Windows Firewall is active on a system from a command prompt using the command netsh advfirewall show currentprofile. If the value of "State" is "ON", then the Windows Firewall is active on the system.

C:\>netsh advfirewall show currentprofile

Domain Profile Settings:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
State                                 ON
Firewall Policy                       BlockInbound,AllowOutbound
LocalFirewallRules                    N/A (GPO-store only)
LocalConSecRules                      N/A (GPO-store only)
InboundUserNotification               Enable
RemoteManagement                      Disable
UnicastResponseToMulticast            Enable

Logging:
LogAllowedConnections                 Disable
LogDroppedConnections                 Disable
FileName                              %systemroot%\system32\LogFiles\Firewall\pfirewall.log
MaxFileSize                           4096

Ok.


C:\>

You can check on whether the firewall is permitting connectivity on a particular network port, e.g., TCP port 3389 for the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), from a PowerShell prompt, which you can obtain by typing powershell in the Windows "Search" field at the bottom of the screen and then clicking on Windows PowerShell when you see it returned by the search function. At the PowerShell prompt, you can issue the command Get-NetFirewallPortFilter | Where-Object { $_.LocalPort -eq 3389 } | Get-NetFirewallRule. If you wished to check on whether firewall connectivity is permitted for some other protocol, substitute the port used by that protocol, e.g., port 22 for Secure Shell (SSH) connections.

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When I sat down at a system running the Microsoft Windows 11 operating system on Saturday, I saw a message stating that Microsoft Paint had updated itself automatically. I had at least a dozen Paint windows open where I had posted screenshots over the past week for things I wanted to check later. I had not saved those Paint windows; I had anticipated going through them on Saturday, extracting information I wanted to keep from some images and then closing the windows and saving others. But I found the update had just closed them all without any prompt asking whether I wanted to save them and without saving the images. So I lost all the information from them irretrievably. Certainly, I should have saved the images in those Paint windows or used some other graphics application that automatically saves the contents of windows for that application or at least won't automatically update itself without saving any unsaved work, but I'm still irritated at the mindset of Microsoft developers regarding not caring about the impact to users if users have unsaved content in Microsoft applications, in addition to being irked with myself for not saving the information. I do use Paint a lot for simple graphics tasks, such as cropping and resizing screenshots, and I don't want it updating itself without warning when that may lead to a loss of information I haven't yet saved. You can determine when a Microsoft Store app was last updated and turn off automatic updates for apps obtained from the Microsoft Store, though you have to turn off the auto update feature for all apps, since there is not a way to do it only for a particular app, such as Paint.

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The PowerShell cmdlet Get-FileHash provides a cryptographic hash function that will allow you to determine a hash value of a file on a Microsoft Windows system. By default, the cmdlet uses the SHA-256 hash function, but you can specify other functions, such as MD5, using the -Algorithm parameter. You can change the output to a list format by piping the output of the cmdlet to Format-List.

PS C:\users\public\downloads> Get-FileHash ".\rel_x64_Xming-7-7-1-1-setup.exe"

Algorithm       Hash                                                                   Path
---------       ----                                                                   ----
SHA256          B7B4C0A191E315686A2481DCC8BBB27D6D7A156FBF689768E48CF08207B86560       C:\users\public\downloads\rel...


PS C:\users\public\downloads> Get-FileHash ".\rel_x64_Xming-7-7-1-1-setup.exe" | Format-List


Algorithm : SHA256
Hash      : B7B4C0A191E315686A2481DCC8BBB27D6D7A156FBF689768E48CF08207B86560
Path      : C:\users\public\downloads\rel_x64_Xming-7-7-1-1-setup.exe



PS C:\users\public\downloads> Get-FileHash -Algorithm MD5 ".\rel_x64_Xming-7-7-1-1-setup.exe"

Algorithm       Hash                                                                   Path
---------       ----                                                                   ----
MD5             BA200636A596A84E0877901CE89D1C2E                                       C:\users\public\downloads\rel...


PS C:\users\public\downloads>

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From a command prompt on a Microsoft Windows system, you can obtain details on the network configuration by issuing the command ipconfig or ipconfig /all, if you wish to see more details. If you are only interested in a specific value or values, though, you can pipe the output of the command to the findstr command. If you wish to see multiple values, e.g., the subnet mask and the default gateway address, you can put text associated with both values, separated by a space, within double quotes. Findstr will treat the space between strings as instructing it to perform a logical OR operation, i.e., it will find any lines that contain either of the strings. Findstr uses a case sensitive search, so you need to either match the case of the text or use the /i option with findstr, which instructs it to ignore the case of text and perform a case insensitive search.

C:\>ipconfig | findstr "Mask Gateway"
   Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.224
   Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1

C:\>ipconfig | findstr "mask gateway"

C:\>ipconfig /all | findstr /i "mask gateway"
   Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.224
   Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1

C:\>

You can also use a Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC) command to obtain the same information.

C:\>wmic nicconfig get defaultIPGateway, IPSubnet
DefaultIPGateway  IPSubnet

{"192.168.1.1"}   {"255.255.255.224", "64"}












C:\>

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line 1
line 2
line 3
line 4
line 5
line 6
line 7
line 8
line 9
line 10

The following Get-Content commands could be used to obtain the first 5 and the last 5 lines in the file.

PS C:\Users\Arnold\Documents> Get-Content somefile.txt -Head 5
line 1
line 2
line 3
line 4
line 5
PS C:\Users\Arnold\Documents> Get-Content somefile.txt -Tail 5
line 6
line 7
line 8
line 9
line 10
PS C:\Users\Arnold\Documents> Get-Content somefile.txt -TotalCount 5
line 1
line 2
line 3
line 4
line 5
C:\Users\Arnold\Documents>

The TotalCount parameter can function like the Head parameter and will return the first x number of lines specified with x being 5 in the example above. You can also use it to obtain a specific line, though. E.g., if you wished to see the 7th line in the file, you could use the command below.

PS C:\Users\Arnold\Documents> (Get-Content Somefile.txt -TotalCount 7)[-1]
line 7
PS C:\Users\Arnold\Documents>

By default the delimiter for lines is the newline, aka end-of-line character, \n, but you can change that with the -Delimiter parameter.

References:

1. Get-Content
   Microsoft Learn

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You can also find the value by checking the Windows Registry, which you can view or edit by using the Registry Editor program that comes with Microsoft Windows. You can find the value by navigating to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Excel\Options and checking the value for AutoRecoverTime.

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