Powershell Oneliner Contest 2017

Year after year I see many people who were old-fashioned mouse clickers adopting PowerShell and thus the average skill level is rising. At the same time, pushed by the arrival of DevOps, a lot of people who are already pretty confident with code are coming to join the ever-growing community of IT professionals that use PowerShell.

So what is the best way of testing your progress than a tricky PowerShell contest and possibly winning a prize?

Let me announce then the third edition of the PowerShell Oneliner Contest:

Before I announce the three tasks you will have to cope with, let me remind you of the spirit of this game:

• this must be a unique learning experience, where solutions posted from experienced scripters will benefit the whole community once they are made public
• novice scripters will have to show a lot of persistence in order to get solutions that work, respect the rules and be creative
• having fun is of paramount importance while bending the command line in a creative way

GENERAL RULES

• The contest is split into three tasks of increasing difficulty
• Each task consists of a simple scenario for which you have to produce the shortest possible oneliner solution
• You can use every PowerShell version, just state in the comment which version you tested it with
• No semi-colons
• Backticks are accepted for readability
• To submit your entry, create a secret Gist for each task solution and post the URL for the Gist as a comment to this blog article
• Submitting an entry that is a public Gist will automatically disqualify the entry and participant
• Sign your comments so that I know who's who and so that I can get in touch with the winner
• Entries (comments) will not be made public until after the submission deadline
• The first person to produce the shortest working solutions to a task will get 1 point, the second 2 points, the third 3 points and so on
• The person with the lowest total score over the three mandatory tasks will be the winner
• The contest will run for nine days beginning today until November 21st 12:00 noon (GMT)
• The winner will be announced on Friday, November 24th on this blog
• I'll be the only judge

TASK 1: MANIPULATING OUTPUT

Windows Management Instrumentation is an incredibly useful technology for exposing system information. Being able to interact with it from PowerShell is one the first things we all learn. Your first task is to write the shortest possible oneliner that extracts the UNC path of all the local shares from the Win32_Share class.

Expected output:

\\srv01\ADMIN$
\\srv01\C$
\\srv01\E$
\\srv01\F$
\\srv01\IPC$

The use of Win32_Share class is mandatory.

TASK 2: MANDELBROT JOKE

I still remember the first time I saw a computer-generated fractal (it was a Barnsley fern), and have always been impressed by those patterns that repeat and repeat again. What I did learn recently is that the 'fractal' term was invented by a legendary Polish mathematician, Benoit Mandelbrot, who added a B. in the middle of his name: supposedly he intended his middle B. to recursively mean Benoit B. Mandelbrot, thereby including a fractal (his mathematical discovery) in his own name.

Your mission is to write the shortest possible oneliner that answers this question

$question = 'What is the middle name of Benoit B. Mandelbrot?'

by returning

The B in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stands for Benoit B. Mandelbrot.

Reuse of $question variable is mandatory.

TASK 3: TEXT MINING

There's a lot of hype today around data mining techniques and therefore I want you to see how good you are at using PowerShell for a special kind of task. Given the following two text variables

$t1 = "I really like scripting with PowerShell"
$t2 = "PowerShell is a really really nice scripting language"

write a oneliner that is capable of determining text likeness using Cosine Similarity and returns

0.516397779494322

The returned value must be 1 if $t1 and $t2 are identical vectors (same words) and 0 if $t1 and $t2 have no words in common.
The comparison must be case insensitive, meaning that PowerShell and powershell are the same word. The string must be split at any non-word character and only unique elements of the resulting collection are compared.
The oneliner should work against any other pair of text variables, for instance

$t1 = "Unless you work hard, you won’t win."
$t2 = "You must work hard. Otherwise, you won’t win."

must return

0.870388279778489

SOLUTION TESTING

Being able to test your solution and see that it respects the rules is of paramount importance before submitting it. If you are taking part in this contest I suppose you must not be new to Pester. Fellow MVP Jakub Jares (@nohwnd) was kind enough to provide a solution validation tool based on his Assert module:

https://github.com/nohwnd/PowershellContest2017

Use the three provided test files (one per task) as stated in the Readme.md instruction file.

A word of notice: using those tests is not mandatory, but my opinion is that we should all be continuously learning, so if you are new to GitHub and to Pester, I suggest you seize the occasion to learn something useful. You'll just be doing yourself a favor if you use Pester to unit test your oneliners, because human error can always happen and it's a pity if you spend a lot of time providing an answer that does not actually work.

If you are interested in Jakub's Assert module, you can find it here:

THE PRIZE

Yes, there's a prize! Fellow MVP Mike F Robbins will donate one copy of The No-Nonsense Beginner’s Guide to PowerShell ebook for the winner of the contest. Thanks in advance to Mike for being always so keen to give his contribution to this kind of initiative. His book is one of the best around, as I explained in a previous post.

As a bonus, and if the winner agrees, he/she will intervene as a guest blogger on this blog and will explain how to solve this kind of PowerShell riddle.

If you want to spread the word about this PowerShell contest, feel free to twit about it. You can use the hashtags #poshcontest2017 and #powershell so that other competitors can share their thoughts (not the solutions of course!).

Have fun!


UPDATE 24th Nov: We have a winner! Check it out here.