Windows PowerShell™ 2 For Dummies®

Chapter 26. The Ten Most Important Cmdlets

In This Chapter

• Using Get-Help to get help

• Getting familiar with your objects using Get-Member

• Using Set-Location to navigate

• Reading text files with Get-Content

• Writing to a file by using Out-File

• Leveraging WMI by using Get-WMIObject

• Using New-Object to create new objects

• Getting picky with Select-Object

• Going through collections with Foreach-Object

• Using Where-Object to control the pipeline

Windows PowerShell 2 contains several hundred Cmdlets. All of them are important in one way or the other, so it's hard to pick just ten of them that you'll need the most. I base this chapter on the Cmdlets I feel are the most important based on their utility.

Getting Help with Get-Help

In a command line–driven environment, you don't get the luxury of being able to simply click menus and buttons or to go through dialog boxes in the hope of finding the option or setting you need to do whatever it is you want to do. Instead, you must know not only the command you want to run, but also what parameters it needs and all the other information related to the command.

The Get-Help Cmdlet is your best friend because it helps you find out all the information you need about any particular Cmdlet. It makes command help available at your fingertips any time. You don't need to go online or open any reference help files. Get-Help gets you minimal or detailed information on Cmdlets — and, more important, shows you examples of how to run them because often, the parameters start ...