Learn Windows PowerShell in a Month of Lunches, Third Edition

Chapter 4. Running commands

When you start looking at PowerShell examples on the internet, it’s easy to get the impression that PowerShell is some kind of .NET Framework–based scripting or programming language. Our fellow Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award recipients, and hundreds of other PowerShell users, are pretty serious geeks who like to dig deep into the shell to see what we can make it do. But almost all of us began right where this chapter starts: running commands. That’s what you’ll be doing in this chapter: not scripting, not programming, but running commands and command-line utilities.

4.1. Not scripting, but running commands

PowerShell, as its name indicates, is a shell. It’s similar to the Cmd.exe command-line shell ...