Powershell: Using a file hash to test for a change

The PowershellForGitHub module is great! But … sometimes it can be a bit verbose when it’s trying to help out new users/developers of the module. This isn’t a bad thing in any way, just a personal preference thing. And, the module owner, Howard Wolosky, is really open to suggestions. Which is great!

So, I opened a ticket (PowerShellForGitHub Issue #124) to explain my confusion over the warning messages. And, to be fair, I explained my confusion in a very confusing way. But, he was nice enough to work through it with me and we found that something we needed was a way to tell if someone had updated a settings file after downloading the module on their machine.

Enter, Get-FileHash.

This command looks like it’s been around for quite a while, but it does the classic job of creating a hash of a file. And, that hash can be stored in code, so that it can be used to check if a change in the file has occurred.

So, how to use the check.

Here’s the original code:

And, here’s the updated code using Get-FileHash: