20 Facts About PowerShell

PowerShell is a task automation and configuration management program from Microsoft, consisting of a command-line shell and the associated scripting language.

PowerShell provides a hosting API with which the PowerShell runtime can be embedded inside other applications.

PowerShell includes its own extensive, console-based help accessible via the Get-Help cmdlet.

On 25 April 2006, not long after the initial Monad announcement, Microsoft announced that Monad had been renamed Windows PowerShell, positioning it as a significant part of its management technology offerings.

Key design tactic for PowerShell was to leverage the large number of APIs that already existed in Windows, Windows Management Instrumentation,.

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However, PowerShell's language was influenced by PHP, Perl, and many other existing languages.

PowerShell provides an interactive command-line interface, where the commands can be entered and their output displayed.

PowerShell enables the creation of aliases for cmdlets, which PowerShell textually translates into invocations of the original commands.

Whenever a cmdlet runs, PowerShell invokes these methods in sequence, with ProcessRecord being called if it receives pipeline input.

PowerShell invokes the mutator with the parameter value or pipeline input, which is saved by the mutator implementation in class variables.

Windows PowerShell includes various cmdlets for managing various Windows systems, including the file system, or using Windows Management Instrumentation to control Windows components.

Windows PowerShell includes a dynamically typed scripting language which can implement complex operations using cmdlets imperatively.

PowerShell provides special variables, such as $args, which is an array of all the command line arguments passed to a function from the command line, and $_, which refers to the current object in the pipeline.

The PowerShell scripting language evaluates arithmetic expressions entered on the command line immediately, and it parses common abbreviations, such as GB, MB, and KB.

However, PowerShell allows for advanced functions that support named parameters, positional parameters, switch parameters and dynamic parameters.

PowerShell can be configured to silently resume execution, without actually throwing the exception; this can be done either on a single command, a single session or perpetually.

PowerShell scripting language supports binary prefix notation similar to the scientific notation supported by many programming languages in the C-family.

One can use PowerShell embedded in a management application, which uses the PowerShell runtime to implement the management functionality.

PowerShell v2 includes changes to the scripting language and hosting API, in addition to including more than 240 new cmdlets.

Many of these similar commands come out-of-the-box defined as aliases within PowerShell, making it easy for people familiar with other common shells to start working.