Professional Windows® PowerShell

Chapter 4. Using the Interactive Shell

One of the most frequent and useful ways to put Windows PowerShell to work is from the Windows PowerShell command line. For example, when you use Windows PowerShell to perform ad hoc diagnostics on a system, you will typically use it interactively from the Windows PowerShell shell command line. To diagnose causes of unusual system behavior effectively, you need to find out what the conditions are that are likely causing problems. To do so, you need to explore the characteristics of the system in an interactive way, which is where the command line comes in. The information that you discover about one aspect of the system's operation can help you focus subsequent commands that you issue. Of course, in some situations you may need to carry out similar diagnostic operations on multiple systems, and it makes sense to save at least some of the commands you use on the command line to a Windows PowerShell script file.

In this chapter, I show you how Windows PowerShell parses characters entered at the command line, so that you can understand the differences between command mode parsing and expression mode parsing. I also show you how to use Windows PowerShell commands to explore, from the command line, important information about the running of a Windows system.