There’s a lot of different ways to loop commands in PowerShell, and here’s one I just learnt (thanks Nathan Kewley for spending the time talking me through this!):

Scenario: You create a brand new user in Active Directory, but need to wait for things to sync before you make a change to the user. If you want to automate these steps, you want to check that the user exists before running more commands against it.

Answer: The ‘While‘ statement. This lets you loop a command ‘while’ something is a certain value. For example, you may want a script to loop for two minutes, or until a certain value is true or false.

With my script below, it will check if the value $running is nothing (null), which it is because we just made it up. Because it’s true, it’ll then continue on to do whatever is in the curly brackets. Here, I’m running a command the enable a user in Skype for Business, but also setting the result of that as the variable $running.

If the command works, $running now has a value of the created user, so as it loops again to see if $running is null, it won’t be, and the ‘while’ statement is done.

If the command fails however, and shows the dangerous red warning around the user not existing, nothing gets set to the $running variable. That means, when it loops again, $running will still be null so it’ll try again and again and again.

while($running -eq $null){
 $running = Enable-CsUser -Identity testuser -SipAddress [email protected]
}

That’s rather dangerous of course, what if it’s forever $null? It’ll run forever, so we’d better put in some failsafes.

while($running -eq $null){
 if($CheckUser -le '10'){
  $CheckUser++
  start-sleep -s 10
  $running = Enable-CsUser -Identity testuser -SipAddress [email protected]
}
}

OK, this time we’re doing a couple more things. We’ve got two curly bracketed things to run now, the first is an ‘If’. If $CheckUser is less or equal to 10, then do the next curly bracket thing. The first time this runs that value again doesn’t exist because we just made it up, and nothing is less or equal to 10. The If statement is true, so it moves onto the next segment.

The $CheckUser++ command just adds ‘1’ to the value of $CheckUser – starting off at null or 0, so will turn into 1. As the statement loops, that number will increment all the way up to 11. Once it’s 11, the If statement is no longer true, so bombs out.

We’ve also added the start-sleep command, which is just a 10 second wait before doing anything. If we didn’t have that there, the 11 loops before it fails would be over incredibly quickly.

The last thing we can add is an event to occur once the ‘If’ statement is no longer true:

while($running -eq $null){
 if($CheckUser -le '10'){
  $CheckUser++
  start-sleep -s 10
  $running = Enable-CsUser -Identity testuser -SipAddress [email protected]
}else{
Throw "Unable to create SfB User"
}
}

All we’ve done here is added the ‘Else’ section, which only runs when the ‘If’ isn’t true. Once the $CheckUser variable hits 11, the ‘Else’ command runs and throws up an error, with the aptly named ‘Throw’ command.

Hopefully this is enough to explain the basics of the ‘While’ command.

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