PowerShell For the Win: Short and Sweet Edition

I just wrote this long and winding tale about how Windows PowerShell exceeded my expecations. Consider this post a sort of TL;DR for that monster.

I found myself needing to scale an image. On Linux and MacOS, I'd use the command line friendly ImageMagick. On Windows, I'd turn to Gimp. But I've got a shiny new tool in PowerShell, so I was curious if it could provide a Windows friendly command line solution. It does!

Step 1: I downloaded the Resize-Image Module from Microsoft's Technet Gallery.

Step 2: I launched PowerShell and typed:

## OK, let's do this...

PS C:\Users\benji\Downloads> Import-Module .\Resize-Image.psm1

# Wait, that worked? Oooh, cool! A quick look at the docs says that I
# can use -Display to preview image. Let me try that.

PS C:\Users\benji\Downloads> Resize-Image -InputFile .\icon.png -Height 200 -Display
Cancel

## The image was displayed, but smooshed

PS C:\Users\benji\Downloads> Resize-Image -InputFile .\icon.png -Height 200 -Width 200 -Display
Cancel

## The image is displayed and looks good. Let's make this official.

PS C:\Users\benji\Downloads> Resize-Image -InputFile .\icon.png -Height 200 -Width 200 -OutputFile icon.200x200.png

## That's it? No errors. No verbose out. I love it.

One gotcha: the OutputFile was stored in my hme directory, not the same directory as icon.png.

Step 3: I wrote this post.

I'm telling you, if you're a command line user and find yourself on Windows, PowerShell is your friend.