Professional Windows® PowerShell

Introduction

Windows PowerShell version 1.0 is Microsoft's first step towards a radically new, exciting, powerful, and comprehensive command line administration tool for Microsoft Windows. For years Windows users have had to use a very limited command line shell, CMD.exe. But no more! Windows PowerShell introduces a new, more powerful, more flexible, more consistent object-based command line tool and scripting language (with a highly consistent syntax). PowerShell is specifically designed to make it possible for you to do administrative tasks that previously you couldn't do at all from the command line and to make many familiar administrative tasks easier. Windows PowerShell can be installed on any machine that is running Windows Server 2003 (Service Pack 1 or later), Windows XP (Service Pack 2 or later) or Windows Vista.

Windows PowerShell is based on cmdlets (pronounced commandlets), which are small, modular commands consistently based on a verb-noun naming system. For example the get-process cmdlet retrieves information about running processes on a machine. You can flexibly combine cmdlets in pipelines to create custom functionality. Pipelines can be simple or of arbitrary complexity. You choose how to combine cmdlets to do things that are useful for you. The sky's the limit, pretty much.

It's great to be able to run pipelines from the command, line but once you have worked on a complex pipeline so that it does exactly what you want, you won't want to discard it. In Windows ...