Using Get-Culture in PowerShell

Welcome back to Wahmans PowerShell blog! Today we’re diving into a simple yet powerful cmdlet: Get-Culture. This cmdlet retrieves the culture settings of the current operating system, including information like date and time formatting, number formatting, and language settings. It’s incredibly useful when working with localization or when you need to tailor script functionality depending on regional configuration.

What Does Get-Culture Do?

Get-Culture returns a CultureInfo .NET object, and by default, it gives you the culture of the user running the script. This culture affects how dates, times, numbers, and currencies are formatted in PowerShell—and it’s based on your OS locale configuration.

Examples

1. Basic Usage

This is the simplest way to use Get-Culture. It displays the current culture information of your system.

Get-Culture

Example output:

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

2. Display the Culture’s Date Format

You can access specific properties to see how things like the short date format are configured in your culture.

(Get-Culture).DateTimeFormat.ShortDatePattern

This can be helpful when formatting dates in scripts to ensure they match user expectations.

3. Conditional Logic Based on Culture

Let’s say you want to perform different actions depending on the user’s culture. Here’s how you might check if the system is using the Swedish language and adjust script behavior accordingly:

$culture = Get-Culture
if ($culture.Name -eq "sv-SE") {
    Write-Output "Hej! Din kultur är Svenska (Sverige)."
} else {
    Write-Output "Hello! Your culture is $($culture.DisplayName)."
}

4. Export Culture Settings for Reporting

If you’re working in an enterprise, you might want to collect culture info from multiple machines. Here’s an example of how to do that using PowerShell remoting:

$computers = @("PC1", "PC2", "PC3")
$report = foreach ($computer in $computers) {
    Invoke-Command -ComputerName $computer -ScriptBlock {
        $culture = Get-Culture
        [PSCustomObject]@{
            ComputerName = $env:COMPUTERNAME
            Culture      = $culture.Name
            DisplayName  = $culture.DisplayName
        }
    }
}
$report | Export-Csv -Path "CultureReport.csv" -NoTypeInformation

Summary

Get-Culture is a small but mighty cmdlet that can make your PowerShell scripts smarter and more adaptable to global environments. From basic display to conditional branching and reporting, it’s a tool worth keeping in your scripting toolkit!

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

Wahmans Powershell Blog

Get-Culture