Professional Windows® PowerShell

3.4. Extensibility and Backward Compatibility

Windows PowerShell uses several techniques to make things easier for users moving to PowerShell from the Windows Cmd.exe shell, from Unix or Linux backgrounds as well as those who use Windows GUI administration tools such as MMC, the Microsoft Management Console, version 3.

3.4.1. Aliases

Aliases are used in Windows PowerShell, but PowerShell is not the first command line tool to use this feature. For example, the WMI command line utility WMIC uses aliases to allow some abstraction from direct use of WMI classes. For example, to find users on a machine try this command:

useraccount list brief

The preceding command lists user accounts on a machine.

Just as WMIC aliases make it easy to access WMI functionality in a succinct way, PowerShell also supports succinct access or familiar access to a range of PowerShell functionality. Some commands, such as cls which is the alias for the clear-host cmdlet, are shorter than the underlying commands and are also familiar to many users who have used it in the CMD.exe shell.

By using aliases, you can simplify your use of PowerShell. For example, to retrieve information about child items of the current location, you can use the following command.

get-childitem *

But when time is pressing or you are writing multistep pipelines on the command line, it is quicker to type the following:

gci *

Or, if you are used to CMD.exe:

dir *

Or, if Unix commands are familiar:

ls *

As you can see from the preceding ...