Guides

Guide

What is PowerShell?

A shell and a scripting language that works with objects, not just text.

PowerShell is two things: a prompt you type into, and a language for scripts. It ships on Windows. PowerShell 7 (pwsh) also runs on macOS and Linux.

Commands are cmdlets. Names are Verb-Noun: Get-ChildItem, Stop-Process. That looks stiff. You get used to it, and you can search by verb or noun with Get-Command.

The important difference from Command Prompt: the pipeline passes objects, not text. Get-ChildItem does not print a blob of characters. It produces file objects with Name, Length, LastWriteTime. The next command can filter on those.

You do not need to memorize the catalog. You need:

  1. How to open a prompt (Open PowerShell)
  2. Get-Help and Get-Member
  3. The habit of -WhatIf before anything that changes files

Then steal one-liners from this site.