PowerShell: Tutorial 2, “Teach a Man to Fish” or Working Out The Command You Need

A series of tutorials, or How To Get Started With PowerShell: “It’s Awesome” edition.

The title was originally built around “Teach A Man A Cmdlet and he PowerShells for a day; Teach a Man to Use Get-Command and he PowerShell’s for a lifetime.” But it got more and more clumsy and convoluted so I finally decided that there really was a limit to my own cleverness.

PowerShell really is quite clever though and makes it really easy to work out the cmdlets you want to use for any task.

Get-Command is used to get, well, commands. As long as you know a word or two of the command you want you can use it to get what you want.

PowerShell commands always have the format [VERB]-[DESCRIPTION] and common verbs are GET, SET, ADD and REMOVE.

So let’s say I wanted to get the size of one of my physical disks. I can use wildcards in Get-Command to work out what I need;

Get-PhysicalDisk looks to be the one. And that returns all my disks;

I can use wildcards again to get just the one I’m interested in too;

That shows me the size of the disk. But that only summarizes a few bits of information about the disk. If I wanted it all I could pipe the output to Format-List (which gives us everything);

Pretty cool!

If I then wanted to work out how to make some changes on my Physical Disk I could use Get-Help to get the information on the Set-PhysicalDisk cmdlet (remembering that Set- was a common verb to make changes to an object).

From that I’d probably look at a few examples;

PowerShell is designed to make people coming from other systems feel at home. A lot of commands have aliases to commands used in other shells. If you’re familiar with DOS you can just use DOS commands;