Windows 7 Annoyances

Windows PowerShell

Windows PowerShell, known prior to its official release as the Monad^[8] Shell (MSH), is an advanced replacement for the good ol’ Command Prompt. Although it uses many familiar DOS commands (sort of), it introduces some Unix-like functionality to the Windows platform while borrowing some of the Windows-aware features found in WSH scripts, like printing, security, and process control.

Note

Windows PowerShell 2.0 is installed along with Windows 7; in earlier versions of Windows, you had to download PowerShell separately from http://www.microsoft.com/powershell/.

At first glance, PowerShell (Figure 9-2) looks like an ordinary Command Prompt window, with the main distinguishing feature being the text PS preceding the prompt (and the blue background color). As you may have guessed, you type a command at the prompt and press Enter to execute the command. But the commands you can type—and how they interact with each other—are what really set PowerShell apart.

Figure 9-2. Microsoft PowerShell, a free, powerful alternative to the Command Prompt, also supports scripting

CmdLets and Aliases

PowerShell’s built-in commands are called CmdLets for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, and the CmdLets all have long, rather inconvenient names like Copy-Item, ConvertFrom-SecureString, and Invoke-Expression. The good news is that most of the commands have short versions, called aliases, that ...