Windows 8 In Depth

Windows PowerShell

Microsoft developed a command-line environment called Windows PowerShell (WPS), which is installed as a standard accessory starting with Windows 7. WPS in many ways looks and acts like the familiar Command Prompt window, but it’s actually a very strange animal, and it gives you access to some very powerful programming tools. We don’t have room in this book to teach you much about it, but we will describe how it differs from batch file and scripts, and we’ll point you to resources that will help you learn more.

We used the word strange. Can a computer program be strange? Definitely! For one thing, most Windows PowerShell commands (which are properly called cmdlets) generate streams of objects, not text. Objects are computer ...