Getting Started With PowerShell (An Absolute beginner’s Guide) -Part 1
This article is for someone who has just got know about the importance of PowerShell and do not know where to start the journey . This article will be useful for those who do not have any knowledge on any programming or scripting language and are just getting started with their career in scripting.The potential audience could be an IT administrator who wants to UpSkill and get competitive for a job change or a promotion ,a college grad who wants to add a skill to the resume so that the profile gets attention.
A bit about the language :-
PowerShell is a scripting language developed by Microsoft ,designed to automating the day to day IT tasks , the adaption of the language has grown exponentially over the years due to continued investment by Microsoft and community of people who kept improving the language over the years.
Getting Started
If you have a windows machine you don’t have to install any external software , to open PowerShell (I will be using the abbreviation PS instead of PowerShell from now on) go to Start → Type PowerShell → Windows PowerShell.
The PS console looks like this:-
Basic Commands
The following are the basic commands you should get yourself familiar with when starting with PS.
Get-help
Get-command
Before getting into talking about the listed commands (we call it cmdlets in PS), lets first understand how the name of a cmdlet is structured: The cmdlets name are divided into two parts Verb-Noun (Get → verb and help →noun) , almost all the PS cmdlets are named following the Verb-Noun format and it is considered the standard way to declare the cmdlets name .
Get-Command
When you are developing a script for any requirement you would need built in cmdlets , it is difficult to find a command for a particular task , get-command assists you in getting the cmdlet that you are looking for , how?
lets say you want to know if there are any built in cmdlets to get services of a windows machine , here is how you utilise get-command to achieve that.
get-command | where name -like “*service*”
Basically here we fetched all the commands available to the session (get-command) and then filtering out the names (where name -like “*Service*”) which contains the keyword service in its name , this will list out all the cmdlets which satisfy the above condition. Now you want to know out of all the listed cmdlets which suits your requirement (in the above scenario get-service seems the most likely candidate).
Get-help <cmdletname>
Now that we have identified the command we want to know how to use the command , to achieve that we use the cmdlet Get-help. how?
Get-help Get-service
Below is the output of above command
If you observe above we get the Syntax of the cmdlet , the description of what the command does however , if you are looking to find out the examples on how to use it you should specify that in the parameter as follows.
get-help get-service -example
The output of the above command is very big and gives you several examples on how to use the command .
With this we have covered basics on how to get started with PowerShell , If you have read all the way through this and are still interested to learn more and become a PowerShell developer , I will be creating various parts for PowerShell learning soon .
Happy Reading!
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