As
shown in Figure 13-2, the interface looks similar to the old familiar command prompt
interface, except Windows PowerShell appears in the title bar, the path for the prompt is
prefixed with the letters PS, and the background color is blue instead of black. You can
type in familiar DOS commands such as CD, DIR, COPY, MOVE, DEL, and so on. But in this
interface, you??™re not running these old commands. Instead, these commands are aliases
Figure 13-2. The Windows PowerShell command window
437 Chapter 13: Windows PowerShell
of real PowerShell cmdlets. To see a list of all the available commands, type help at the
prompt and press enter. As you can see in Figure 13-3, a list of all available commands is
displayed including aliases. Press enter again to continue, and you can scroll through all
the aliases and cmdlets available. For example, the DIR command is an alias to the Get-
ChildItem cmdlet and HELP is actually an alias to the Get-Help cmdlet.
If you want to learn more about a particular command, you can use Get-Help
to display that information. For example, if you want to know more about the Get-
ChildItem cmdlet, you can run this command:
Get-Help Get-ChildItem
Typing Get-Help will show you how to use this cmdlet. The most important switch is
-full, which displays the full help file for a particular command. Using Get-ChildItem
as an example, here??™s the command to get more detailed help about Get-ChildItem as
well as a few examples:
Get-Help Get-ChildItem -full
Figure 13-3.
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