New-JobTrigger

Exploring PowerShell’s New-JobTrigger: Schedule Your Tasks with Precision

Welcome back to Wahmans PowerShell blog! Today we’re diving into the incredibly useful New-JobTrigger cmdlet. This cmdlet is your key to automating scheduled tasks using PowerShell jobs. According to Microsoft’s documentation, the New-JobTrigger cmdlet creates a job trigger for a scheduled job. That means you can schedule a job to run at a specific time, on an interval, or in response to user logon and startup events!

Let’s walk through some practical examples of New-JobTrigger, going from beginner-friendly to more advanced scenarios.

Example 1: Basic Daily Trigger

This example creates a daily trigger that starts a job at 8:00 AM every day.

New-JobTrigger -Daily -At 8:00AM

This trigger can then be associated with a scheduled job using Register-ScheduledJob.

Example 2: Weekly Job Trigger

Suppose you want to run a script every Monday and Friday at 6:30 PM. Here’s how you can do that:

New-JobTrigger -Weekly -DaysOfWeek Monday,Friday -At 6:30PM

Easy and efficient!

Example 3: Trigger on Computer Startup

You can also trigger jobs when the system starts. This can be useful for essential maintenance scripts.

New-JobTrigger -AtStartup

This creates a trigger that activates your job every time the computer is booted.

Example 4: Complex Date Range and Repeat Interval

For advanced scheduling, you might want a job to start on a specific date and repeat every 30 minutes for a specific span of hours. Let’s do that:

New-JobTrigger -Once -At "03/01/2024 9:00AM" -RepetitionInterval (New-TimeSpan -Minutes 30) -RepetitionDuration (New-TimeSpan -Hours 6)

This will start the job at 9:00 AM on March 1st, 2024, and repeat it every 30 minutes for 6 hours. Super handy for time-bound automation!

Wrapping Up

The New-JobTrigger cmdlet provides amazing flexibility for automating your PowerShell scripts. Whether you’re scheduling daily tasks or setting up complex workflows, it’s a powerful tool in your automation arsenal.

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