Understanding a little bit about how PowerShell works goes a long way to helping you find the PS-resources you need and code PS more efficiently and comfortably. You should now have an integrated development environment (or an editor you feel comfortable with) and you can use the IDE to take a look at how Powershell is semantically structured and get and the functions PowerShell has to help you to code faster.
Powershell cmdlets have a VERB-NOUN structure and are generally case insensitive. There are other aspects of cmdlets that you need to note. These are:
- Powershell Verbs
- Powershell Nouns
- Aliases
- Autocomplete
Achtung: We are providing links to web pages here but encourage you to use the Powershell console. To get a list of PS-verbs,open PowerShell and type get-verb.
While command nouns are configurable, verbs are not. Verbs are curated by Microsoft, and you can find the official list by clicking the link above. Even better though, you can get a list of verbs by typing get-verb from the command prompt in the PS-Console
Verbs are grouped logically, and it is a good idea get acquainted with, which verbs belong to which groups. Knowing verb grouping helps you to search more intuitively for cmdlets. You can also filter verbs by group.
Example: To print all verbs that belong to the "Security" group you type:get-verb | where-object {$_.Group -eq "Security"}.
Nouns can vary based on what the PS cmdlet is supposed to do. It is even possible to create your own cmdlets and Powershell modules that access various services. If you leverage the APIs of powershell and another service to create something new, the noun part of your powershell cmdlet would be completely unique like - Get-NewlyIntegratedService.
Achtung: When you search for Powershell cmdlets or scripts you can use verbs or nouns or both. You can also use wildcard characters like * for your search.
The Verb-Noun pattern is good to get started and helps with intuitive discovery of cmdlets - so you can find and use them fast. Once you get to know the cmdlets though, you can use the alias to script cmdlets more quickly. For example, get-command cmdlet alias is gcm. You can get the complete list of PS-aliases by type get-alias or its alias, gal, in the PS-console.
Command alias is also included in the help of individual commands. By typing help get-command, you can see the alias "gcm" in the get-command help page.
One of the nice things about powershell is that you can leverage the TAB autocomplete for ALL ASPECTS of PowerShell from the command line as well as from a good IDE.
Not only can you autocomplete cmdlets, but also cmdlet parameters, enumerated values of these parameters, and so on by using the TAB key. PowerShell just knows how to autocomplete - it's a little bit like people, who know you so well that they can finish your thought most of the time.
This is not in the list but another framework feature of PowerShell is "positional parameters". For these parameters, you only have to type the value, not the parameter name. PowerShell understands your argument implicitly, because of the position of the parameter.
PowerShell cmdlets return objects and not text. This makes it easier and faster to pipe output to the next cmdlet and process it. This is, by the way, not the case with some other scripting languages in other operating systems. These language return text and you have to parse it, before you can pipe it for further processing.
Finally, PowerShell passes these returned objects to the next cmdlet over the pipeline with the "|" symbol. Using the pipeline enables you to create powerful workflows to process the data you need to perform your tasks.
In PowerShell, you have a scripting language that allows you to execute scripts without a compiler, that makes it easier for you to script via an intuitive verb-noun cmdlet pattern. You are speeded even more with aliases for these commands and by having robust autocomplete at the PS-prompt and in the IDE. Finally, if you need it, you can also leverage Microsoft .NET and COM libraries to do even more.
This structure and these features not only make it easier to script, they also make it easier to discover what you can do with PowerShell, and create powerful scripts as you'll see in the next sections.
- Understand how Powershell is structured.
- Understand cmdlet structure and know features that allow to code cmdlets more comfortably.
- Be primed to research cmdlets in the next section