Redding California

On November 15, Microsoft released Windows PowerShell 1.0 (formerly
codenamed Monad) for Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) and Windows Server
2003, which you can download at


http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926139


Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 (RC1) version is also available,
with the final Vista version available by January 31, 2007. The download
is less than 2MB but does require that Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0
is installed. Once PowerShell is installed, a new Programs group, Windows
PowerShell 1.0, will be created, which has a number of shortcuts to
documents and the actual Windows PowerShell application shortcut which
points to the %SystemRoot%\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe
image.

PowerShell is the future command-line and scripting environment for the
management and automation of Windows environments, and many new
Microsoft technologies have their management built on the PowerShell
environment. For example, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 relies heavily
on the PowerShell environment for many management actions.

The base PowerShell also includes a number of command-line tools called
cmdlets that allow access to many system resources such as accessing
the registry, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), services,
processes, event logs, and basically every part of the OS.

Common cmd.exe commands such as Dir and Type all work in the
PowerShell, but its real power is via its improved cmdlets. To get
started, it's easiest to type

get-help

which opens an overview of the format of the PowerShell syntax and
commands to get started. For example, the get-command command will
display a list of all the cmdlets, and the get-command <cmdlet name>
will display detailed information on that cmdlet.

Some handy commands to get started are get-service and get-process,
which give information about services and processes, respectively.

In this example, the information is displayed in a table format, but
you can easily output it to a list by passing format-list as it's
output.

To get a list of all possible formats, type

get-help format*

at a command line.

Last edited by toad (Thursday December 07th 2006 3:15:42 pm)