Windows Server 2008: The Definitive Guide

Getting Help with PowerShell

Learning any new tool, program, or OS takes time—but some are easier to get to know than others. PowerShell was designed from the outset to be as discoverable as possible. Once you know a few small things, you can use that knowledge to learn more and to get up to speed.

There are two cmdlets that you will find helpful to get you started: Get-Help and Get-Command. The Get-Help cmdlet gets help about PowerShell cmdlets and key concepts. Get-Command gets basic information about cmdlets and other commands you can use from within PowerShell. Additionally, every PowerShell cmdlet supports the -? parameter to get help.

The Get-Help cmdlet takes a parameter to indicate what you want to get help on. One neat feature is that you can use wild cards in the parameter to get help about more than one thing, as shown here:

PSH [D:\foo]:get-help get-h*

Name        Category Synopsis
----        -------- --------
Get-Help    Cmdlet   Displays information about Windows PowerShell
                     cmdlets and concepts.
Get-History Cmdlet   Gets a list of the commands entered during the
                     current session.
Get-Host    Cmdlet   Gets a reference to the current console host
                     object. Displays Windows PowerShell version...
Get-Hash    Cmdlet   Gets the hash value for the specified file or
                     byte array via the pipeline.
Get-HTTP    Cmdlet   The get-http cmdlet can be used to retrieve
                     documents from the World Wide Web.

This example looked for help on Get-H* and that returned a synopsis of the five cmdlets on the system that match this wild ...