As name suggest, Windows PowerShell is powerful command line shell. Windows PowerShell is built on top of .Net framework and internally uses .Net framework objects to run commands. PowerShell uses cmdlets (“command-let”) to perform various actions. PowerShell ships with hundreds of cmdlets and you can also create your own cmdlets as per your need. Windows PowerShell is installed by default with Windows 7 SP1 onwards editions.
PowerShell is a tool and can be used to perform day to day
activities. This tool is very useful to developers and administrators to do
their activities and they can write scripts or programs to ease their work. Like
many other shells, Windows PowerShell allows you to access file/directory
system and other computer/network/remoting related information.
In this article, I’ll explain how to start PowerShell and introduce
some basic commands for you to start with PowerShell.
How to start PowerShell
For windows 10 – search PowerShell on search bar. (Pre-installed with windows 10)
Once you launch PowerShell below window will appear.
You can use directory commands like DIR, CD, CD\, CD..,
MKDIR, RMDIR, COPY, DEL etc with PowerShell that you already using
with Command Prompt.
When you execute these commands on PowerShell, internally PowerShell
uses other cmdlets. For example, when you type DIR command on PowerShell
window, it will internally use Get-ChildItem command to list all directories and files.
Get-Alias
You can use Get-Alias command to check which underlying command
is mapped with alias.
Get-Alias dir
To check the entire alias you can type Get-Alias command
without parameter.
Get-Alias
Get-Command
You can use ‘Get-Command’ to check what all commands
available in PowerShell.
Get-Command | more
You can also search available command using wildcards like
below.
Get-Command *process
You can also use verb or noun parameters to get all the
commands with specified verb or noun
Get-Command -Verb get | more
Get-Command -noun process
You can use below command to check total commands currently available
in PowerShell.
(Get-Command).Count
Get-Help
You can use Get-Help command to get help about any commands
in PowerShell.
Get-Help Get-ChildItem | more
If you would like to know help only about specific parameter of that command then you can use below command.
Get-Help Get-ChildItem -Parameter filter
You can get help of any command in all the details with example
using below command.
Get-Help Get-ChildItem -Full |more
If your PowerShell help is not updated since long time then
you can use below command to update help. This command will take some time to
execute and download help.
Update-Help -Force
I hope you now have some basic knowledge about how to start PowerShell and how to search various commands and get help about them.
Thank you for reading this article. Please leave your
feedback in comments below.
Reference –
