PowerShell: Automating Administrative Tasks
by Michael Shepard, Chendrayan Venkatesan, Sherif Talaat, Brenton J.W. Blawat
PowerShell aliases
If you tried to use DIR and CD in the last section, you may have noticed that they didn't work exactly as the DOS commands that they resemble. In case you didn't see this, enter DIR /S on a PowerShell prompt and see what happens. You will either get an error complaining about a path not existing, or get a listing of a directory called S. Either way, it's not the listing of files including subdirectories. Similarly, you might have noticed that CD in PowerShell allows you to switch between drives without using the /D option and even lets you change to a UNC path. The point is that, these are not DOS commands. What you're seeing is a PowerShell alias.
Aliases in PowerShell are alternate names that PowerShell uses for both PowerShell ...
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