Get-UICulture

Getting to Know Get-UICulture in PowerShell

Welcome back to Wahmans PowerShell blog! Today, we’re diving into a simple but very useful cmdlet: Get-UICulture. This cmdlet returns information about the current user interface (UI) culture settings of your operating system. This is especially useful when localizing scripts or customizing output for users in different regions/languages.

What Does Get-UICulture Do?

According to Microsoft’s documentation:

Get-UICulture gets the current UI culture settings in the operating system.

In simpler terms, this cmdlet tells you what language the system is currently configured to use for its UI.

Beginner Example 1: Checking Your Current UI Culture

If you just want to see what your system is set to, run:

Get-UICulture

This will output something like:

LCID             Name             DisplayName
----             ----             ------------
1033             en-US            English (United States)

Example 2: Extract Specific Culture Properties

You can dive deeper by selecting specific properties:

(Get-UICulture).DisplayName

This will return a string such as:

English (United States)

This is useful if you want to customize script output based on the user’s language.

Intermediate Example 3: Conditional Logic Based on UI Culture

You can use Get-UICulture to change script behavior dynamically. For instance:

switch ((Get-UICulture).Name) {
    'en-US' { Write-Host "Hello!" }
    'fr-FR' { Write-Host "Bonjour!" }
    'de-DE' { Write-Host "Hallo!" }
    default { Write-Host "Hello, world!" }
}

This technique is particularly helpful when writing multiplatform, multilingual scripts.

Advanced Example 4: Export Culture Settings for User Profiles

You can combine Get-UICulture with other cmdlets to export information for auditing or configuration purposes.

$usersCulture = @{}
$users = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_UserAccount -Filter "LocalAccount='True'"
foreach ($user in $users) {
    $culture = Invoke-Command -ScriptBlock { (Get-UICulture).Name } -Credential $user.Name
    $usersCulture[$user.Name] = $culture
}
$usersCulture | Export-Csv -Path "C:\CultureSettings.csv" -NoTypeInformation

Note: This script requires appropriate permissions and might need tweaking depending on your environment.

Wrap-Up

Whether you are localizing a PowerShell script or troubleshooting user configurations, Get-UICulture is a handy cmdlet to have in your toolbelt. It’s simple, yet powerful when combined with conditional logic and automation.

Happy scripting, and I will see you in the next post!