I’ve been diving into PowerShell help lately while preparing my next Pluralsight course. One of the sad things I have discovered is the loss of provider-aware help. As you may know, some commands have parameters that only exist when using a specific PSDrive. For example, the -File parameter for Get-ChildItem only works in the file…
Tag: Get-Command
Managing PowerShell Functions
Most of you probably know I’ve been using PowerShell since its beta days which now means I have about 10 years worth of PowerShell files. I find it hard to throw anything away. Over this time frame my PowerShell profile scripts have also grown, often loading functions that I’ve come up with. The effect has …
Get PowerShell Parameter Aliases
During a recent PowerShell training class we naturally covered aliases. An alias is simply an alternate name, often something that is shorter to type, or maybe even more meaningful. There are aliases for commands, properties and parameters. Discovering aliases for commands is pretty easy with Get-Alias. Property aliases are discoverable using Get-Member. But, discovering parameter…
Browsing PowerShell Commands
Whenever I’m exploring a new PowerShell module or snapin, one of the first things I do is list all of the commands found within the module. PS C:\scripts> get-command -module psworkflow CommandType Name ModuleName ———– —- ———- Function New-PSWorkflowSession PSWorkflow Cmdlet New-PSWorkflowExecutionOption PSWorkflow You can specify either a module or a snapin. Use the -module…
Friday Fun PowerShell Commands by Noun
One of PowerShell’s greatest strength’s is discoverability. Once you know how, it is very easy to discover what you can do with PowerShell and how. One reason this works is because PowerShell commands follow a consistent verb-noun naming convention. With this in mind, you can see all of the commands organized by noun. get-command -CommandType…
Create an HTML PowerShell Help Page
Yesterday I posted an article about getting the online url for a cmdlet help topic. Today I want to demonstrate how we might take advantage of this piece of information. Since the link is already in the form of a URL, wouldn’t it make sense to put this in an HTML document? At first glance,…
Create a Master PowerShell Online Help Page
As I hope you know, PowerShell cmdlets can include links to online help. This is very handy because it is much easier to keep online help up to date. To see online help for a cmdlet use the -online parameter. get-help get-wmiobject -online I decided to take things to another level and create an HTML…
Summary Judgment
While working on a new article for REDMOND magazine about PowerShell 2.0, I wanted to get some cmdlet information. I wanted an easy way to see a list of cmdlets for a given verb or noun. Of course that is easily done with Get-Command. However this only gives my the definition.
After a little experimenting I found that I could get the help synopsis with the actual Get-Help cmdlet, not the Help function. So combining the two gives me the results I need.