Getting Started with Powershell

I’m in the process of learning PowerShell. This seems to be the first scripting language that we can use at the server/desktop level that has some serious backing from Microsoft. I remember VBScript, CScript, Batch files, and similar, but it seemed that if I wanted to run a script, I had to find workarounds or plug-ins to do what I wanted inside of some other language and then mix and match those together.  Powershell seems to drive a lot of processes behind the scenes. That being said, here’s a quick summary of some important things I’m learning in the process.

1. Powershell can call executables directly, but needs an explicit path to those executables if they aren’t in the system path. This means that you may need to use .\MyProgram.exe instead of just MyProgram.exe.

2. get-help command  – I can see myself spending a lot of time with this to figure out syntax and uses for various commands. As I’ve played around with it tonight, I’m really impressed by how much information is available without needing to leave PowerShell. Reminds me a lot of the “man” pages in *IX, but with more examples and in a language I can understand.

3. get-command –verb verb – Another useful command to list all Powershell Cmdlets containing that verb.

4. Parameters can be abbreviated as long as there are enough characters to uniquely ID the parameter. An error message will be thrown if there aren’t enough. Probably better to let auto-complete handle the parameter name in that case to avoid possible ambiguity.

5. Common Parameters. There are apparently several common parameters that should be available for most Cmdlets.  I can see a lot of use for –ErrorVariable and –OutVariable. These are designed to capture error or output details, respectively.

6. Aliases. I can see these being both helpful and a little painful. Helpful in that a lot of familiar commands such as dir and ls are aliases, but painful in forgetting that I’ve set one and seeing some underlying Cmdlet change. I guess I have some qualms from my days of using a pretty customized BASH shell and forgetting a lot of the basics that were used to create that shell in the first place. Just running the get-help on Alias returned several screens of information. Example command to run to see CmdLet followed by its aliases:
   dir alias: | Group-Object definition

  And just as I figured, there’s a way to export the aliases and re-import them from a file later so you don’t need to define them each time you restart Powershell. Export-Alias and Import-Alias

7. Virtual Drives. PowerShell has a lot of different virtual drives set up to access Aliases, Registry settings, physical drives, and others. I’ll be exploring those more as I need them. I’m halfway assuming that one of these tied to a server would be related to AD structures, but that may just be a whole new set of Cmdlets.

I think this may be a good place to stop for the day. It seems the next section deals with functions which are reminding of DOS Batch file parameters at first glance. I hope that is not the case, but I’ll know more about that tomorrow. So far I’ve gotten a good handle on some of the basics and learned some ways to help myself during scripting. That’s a great start.