For this posting, I present an uptime command. This is the sort of thing that most scripters wind up writing, I suppose. For me, the neat thing was how just a few lines of script produced a program that was more flexible and usable than an old, compiled EXE program that I had been carting with me around on a USB stick for years.
A little bit of this code is a refactoring of code posted at BSOnPosh, but that page seems to have been taken down during a site re-arrangement and my search didn't find anything. IIRC, I wanted an easier way to get uptime information for more than one server, so I refactored some of his code (the WMIDate conversion, which I wanted to be able to re-use for other things, is sort of fiddly) and added my own code to loop over the pipe line input, to produce the TextDescription and to make the select-object code more readable by using the $fields variable to hold all of the necessary script blocks.
Anyway, I present what I've got for your perusal. Personally, I like to see different approaches to the same problem as it often gives additional insight into what is possible. Those "Wow, that's much easier than what I've been doing" moments can be embarrassing, but they also mean that I'm learning and IT isn't an industry where you can afford to stop learning.
The code is here. As usual, it's pretty straightforward. (My most ambitious scripts are really too site-specific to be of use to anyone else.) There is a helper function, Convert-WMIDateToSystemDate, which does exactly what you'd think and there is the main function, Get-Uptime, which also does as you'd expect.
You could invoke the function like this:
("server1", "server2") | get-uptime | sort TotalSeconds | ft -a
The more interesting columns are the "TotalSeconds" column, which is more useful for sorting than actually being read and interpreted by humans, and the "TextDescription" column, which describes the uptime of a server in days, hours, minutes and seconds and is easily understood by the most P of PHBs.
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