Learn Windows PowerShell in a Month of Lunches

Chapter 2. Running commands

Start looking at PowerShell examples on the internet, and it’s easy to get the impression that PowerShell is some kind of .NET Framework–based scripting or programming language. My fellow Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award recipients, and hundreds of other PowerShell users, are pretty serious geeks, and we like to dig deep into the shell and see what we can make it do. But almost all of us began right where this chapter starts: simply running commands. That’s what we’ll be doing in this chapter: not scripting, not programming, but just running commands and command-line utilities.

2.1. Not scripting: just running commands

PowerShell, as its name implies, is a shell. It’s similar to the Cmd.exe command-line ...