Announcing the winner of the Powershell Oneliner Contest 2017

The PowerShell Oneliner Contest 2017 is over and we have a winner. The three tasks ranged from pretty easy to extremely difficult, and many quickly discovered the plethora of barriers that make it difficult to successfully manipulate the pipeline, especially when dealing with math problems. Some though came up with working solutions that are short and imaginative.

Let me announce then the top 5 PowerShell monks in the contest:

1st - Ka-Splam from UK

2nd - Simon Wåhlin (@SimonWahlin) from Sweden

3rd - Brian Scholer (@BrianScholer) from USA

4th - Nathan Ziehnert (@theznerd) from USA

5th - Bartek Bielawski (@bielawb) from Poland

Congratulations to Ka-Splam for becoming the 2017 oneliner champion with the following solutions:

TASK 1: MANIPULATING OUTPUT - 42 chars

gwmi win32_share|%{$_-replace'root.*?"|"'}

TASK 2: MANDELBROT JOKE - 53 chars

"The B in$(($b=$question|% s*g 26 21)) stands for$b."

TASK 3: TEXT MINING - 179 chars

foreach($w in $t1,$t2-split($x='\W+')|sort -u){$n=,($t+=($a=($t1-split$x-eq$w).count)*($b=($t2-split$x-eq$w).count)),($l+=$a*$a),($m+=$b*$b)}$t/([math]::Sqrt($l)*[math]::Sqrt($m))

Congratulations again to Ka-Splam: the Powershell ebook from Mike F Robbins is yours!

I would like also congratulate Simon Wåhlin for writing the shortest answer to Task 2 - 50 chars:

gv q* -v|% Su* 26 21|%{"The B in$_ stands for$_."}

I am also pleased to announce that the top three competitors have accepted to be my guests on this blog, so stay tuned for their posts and, believe me, there is a lot to learn in perspective, from their approach to the tasks to a profusion of tips and tricks to make your PowerShell high caliber!

• Ka-Splam guest post scheduled for 27th Nov
• Simon guest post scheduled for 30th Nov
• Brian guest post scheduled for 5th Dec

I can't close this post without a special thank to Jakub Jares from the Czech Republic (@nohwnd) for his great involvement in the setup of the Pester-based test environment.