Getting started with Powershell -- the first five minutes

The first five minutes with powershell are the hardest. After that it's all easy.

First try some familiar commands

Classic commands from windows shell and from DOS, and from other environments appear to work just fine in PowerShell.

For example you an type:

dir

And see a list of the files in the current directory.

(If you're a linux user, you can also type ls and see the same result.)

What's happening here? Is dir a command in powershell? No, it's an alias, provided for convenience.

If you type alias dir you will see the real name of the command you are calling...

> alias dir

CommandType     Name                                                Definition
-----------     ----                                                ----------
Alias           dir                                                 Get-ChildItem

Ah-ha!, so dir is an alias for Get-ChildItem.

Now, given an alias you can find the underlying command. And you've seen that commands are named like this: Get-ChildItem, i.e. Verb-Noun. So you can often make a good guess at the name of a command.

Finding commands, working out what they return

You can look for commands by name or alias, using 'Get-Command', e.g.

Get-Command Get-ChildItem

Or you can look at ALL the available commands by typing simply:

Get-Command

What can I do with this object?

To find out what you can do with an object, any object, use Get-Member

dir | Get-Member

This shows you all the members (properties and methods) of the objects return by dir.

You can then look at the different members, and see which ones you are interested in.

e.g. I look at the output of the command above and decide I want to see the "FullName" -- so I run:

dir | % FullName

This means: run the dir command, send the output to a foreach (%) and return the FullName property for each object.

So Get-Member is one of the fundamental ways you teach yourself about powershell.

About_Signing

set-executionpolicy

powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy bypass

Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope CurrentUser

If you want more help on a command you can type:

Help dir