Starting Processes or Commands Within Powershell

It's been a busy couple of days. Saturday night I spent at work doing this month's Windows patches. I'm tasked with trying to put together a patching procedure for about 70 servers that can be shared among multiple admins so that we don't step on each other's toes. Our SAN doesn't have a whole lot of throughput, so when multiple VMs are patched simultaneously it tends to slow everything down. It's almost easier to do it myself, really, but in the long run my family (and my sleep schedule) will thank me for spreading the load.

New Powershell command of the week: Start-Process
This is the command I ended up using to automate my Veeam Backup & Recovery jobs. One example for usage is:
start-process "C:\Robocopy.exe" -ArgumentList '"j:\Backup Exec\Backups "Z:\Backup Exec\Backups" /MIR /NP /LOG:C:\RobocopyBE.log'

Notice that my argument is blocked within single quotes, and then the paths, which include spaces, are blocked in double quotes, as is customary with this command. The single quotes tell Powershell to parse the text in between them as is. Here is a really cool blog post about the different ways that Powershell can run commands. While start-process is itself not addressed, usage of Invoke-Command and Invoke-Expression are. I like that there are multiple ways to accomplish things in Powershell. Sometimes I end up beating my head against the wall trying to get a command to work a certain way, and if I don't get too stubborn, I find that I can usually back up, find a different methos to achieve my ends, and then move on more quickly.