Question

In PowerShell 2.0 on Win2008R2, if I want to get the same output from a registry key that “REG QUERY” would give me, in as readable a format, with the values from a particular registry key, like this:

reg query hkcu\Software\Microsoft\CharMap

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\CharMap
    Advanced    REG_DWORD    0x0
    CodePage    REG_SZ       Unicode
    Font        REG_SZ       Arial

How would I do that with PowerShell? The behaviour of PowerShell mystifies me, once again.

Get-ItemProperty example:

Get-ItemProperty HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\CharMap


PSPath       : Microsoft.PowerShell.Core\Registry::HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\CharMap
PSParentPath : Microsoft.PowerShell.Core\Registry::HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft
PSChildName  : CharMap
PSDrive      : HKCU
PSProvider   : Microsoft.PowerShell.Core\Registry
Advanced     : 0
CodePage     : Unicode
Font         : Arial

In my contrived example above, I want to see “Advanced”, “CodePage” and “Font”, but not any of the PowerShell metadata (names starting in PS). Sadly filtering on the name “PS” would not work for me, because I am not REALLY trying to read the MS Windows Character Map settings, I simply chose them as a registry key that probably everyone with Windows has, so everyone can see how utterly different the experience of using PowerShell is to look at the registry, compared to say the REG.EXE program. There are reasons why anybody might want to get just the registry values from a registry key without getting any of the metadata, and anybody writing tools in PowerShell may want to do this simple task.

I would like output similar to REG QUERY but still in native PowerShell format, not just flattened to text. I’ve googled and searched all over and can’t seem to figure this out.

I’d like to be able to for example do this:

  $all = GetRealRegistryKeysFrom(  HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\CharMap )
  for ($item in $all) { ... }

Update Using the function below, works great….

Example Get-RegistryKeyPropertiesAndValues -path HKCU:\Software\.....

Answer 1

This is a trick:

Get-ItemProperty HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\CharMap  | out-string -stream | ? { $_ -NOTMATCH '^ps.+' }

The problem is when a property start with PS . Working on this code you can elaborate to exclude these:

PSPath
PSParentPath
PSChildName
PSDrive
PSProvider

… One by one inside the where clause. Or just try using

get-item hkcu\Software\Microsoft\CharMap

There a script that do what you need.

update reproduced script here:

Function Get-RegistryKeyPropertiesAndValues
{
  <#
    Get-RegistryKeyPropertiesAndValues -path 'HKCU:\Volatile Environment'
    Http://www.ScriptingGuys.com/blog
  #>

 Param(

  [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)]
  [string]$path)

 Push-Location
 Set-Location -Path $path
 Get-Item . |
 Select-Object -ExpandProperty property |
 ForEach-Object {
 New-Object psobject -Property @{"property"=$_;
    "Value" = (Get-ItemProperty -Path . -Name $_).$_}}
 Pop-Location
} #end function Get-RegistryKeyPropertiesAndValues