PowerShell: Check whether a Windows command or executable is available

In one of my recent PowerShell scripts I needed to find out if certain commands (in my case “svn”, “git”, “ant” and “mvn”) were available or not. I wrote this small function that tries to call the given command and returns whether it is callable. function commandAvailable($cmd, $options) { $error.clear(); …

Continue reading

VBoxManage: error: VT-x features locked or unavailable in MSR. (VERR_VMX_MSR_LOCKED_OR_DISABLED)

Today I wanted to add a new 64bit virtual machine to my VirtualBox installation but when I tried to power it on I got the following error message: root@debian /home/vms/Webserver # VBoxManage startvm Webserver –type headless Waiting for VM “Webserver” to power on… VBoxManage: error: VT-x features locked or unavailable …

Continue reading

PowerShell: How to read contents from text files without converting the lines into an array

Apparently, PowerShell’s get-content cmdlet automatically converts the contents of text files into an array of strings, splitting the contents at the line breaks (see Using the Get-Content Cmdlet). In many cases this is convenient: Contents of file test.txt: 1 2 3 gc text.txt | % { write-host “line: ” $_ …

Continue reading