Notice: The following post was originally published on another website. As the post is no longer accessible, it is being republished here on tommymaynard.com. The post was originally published on February 27, 2019.

Every once in a while, I write a short little article — if, I can even call it that — and then it sits around for a month or so doing nothing. It just hangs out in my drafts and stares at me. It’s happened again. Instead of focusing on it any longer, I’m writing this paragraph as my excuse, so I can publish this now and move on, already.

I saw the below Tweet late last year and I had a thought.

I love how having several windows of #Powershell open makes you look busy and/or like you know what you are doing.
— John Dalek (@DeckerDalek) November 20, 2018

I’ll go ahead and agree; why not?

I can see how this may give off that impression. With that quick and internal agreement, I had an idea. If PowerShell can make you look busy, then let’s use PowerShell to make it appear, you’re busy. We’ll open some consoles and execute some “work,” all with a single invocation of a single function. I’ll just be over here waiting for PowerShell to catch up with me.

The below function creates this illusion, just in case this is something you’re after. Hopefully, it’s not, as we all likely have some real PowerShell to read, write, and review. Me included.

Function Show-MeBeingSuperBusy {
    [CmdletBinding()]
    Param (
        [Parameter()]
        [ValidateRange(1,10)]
        [int]$ConsoleCount = 1
    )
    
    Begin {
        $Argument = '-NoProfile -Command & {1..50 | ForEach-Object {Get-PSDrive}}',
            '-NoProfile -Command & {1..50 | ForEach-Object {Get-Process}}',
            '-NoProfile -Command & {1..50 | ForEach-Object {Get-Service}}',
            '-NoProfile -Command & {1..50 | ForEach-Object {Get-Item -Path env:\}}'
    } # End Begin.
    
    Process {
        For ($i = 1; $i -le $ConsoleCount; $i++) {
            Start-Process -FilePath powershell.exe -ArgumentList ($Argument | Get-Random)
        } # End For.
    } # End Process.
    
    End {
    } # End End.
} # End Function: Show-MeBeingSuperBusy.
 
Show-MeBeingSuperBusy -ConsoleCount 5

And that’s it. Short, simple, and hardly very helpful. Now that this “article” is gone from my drafts, I should be able to focus on something a little more helpful — we’ll see. This might be all the help someone needed from me today, however.

Edit: As a part of bringing this old content back to tommymaynard.com, I tried out this function. It works, but be sure to give it a moment before you begin to think it is not working!