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So that's enough talk, enough slides.

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Let's jump into PowerShell,

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and let me give you some examples of how to use PowerShell help.

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All right, so let's take a look at PowerShell help in PowerShell 7.

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Now just so you know, I'm running PowerShell 7 in a Windows terminal.

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It makes no difference whether you use a Windows

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terminal or the PowerShell console,

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the commands and everything is going to behave the same.

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So let me start here by just doing get‑help for the get‑service command.

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And this is a brand new installation of PowerShell 7 on Windows 10.

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So you can see, it goes through very quickly,

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and I get that little remarks at the end saying hey,

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PowerShell does not have all of the updated help.

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It's only displaying partial help.

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And it gives me instructions there on how to run Update‑Help.

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So I'm going to go ahead and run Update‑Help right now,

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and then we'll talk about it while this is running

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because this will take a few minutes.

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So a few things here about Update‑Help, and you can see that it's working there.

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There is no indication when you are running PowerShell that

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there is new help to download other than what you see here

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when you have a new installation.

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In order to update help, you must be running in an elevated PowerShell session,

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meaning you must run it as administrator.

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And now you can see there in the title bar of my terminal,

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I'm running PowerShell as administrator.

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So that's the first thing.

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You also need to know that when you run update‑help,

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what this is doing is going out,

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typically to Microsoft or wherever the link in the help is pointing to and

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downloading the CAB file that have the help documentation.

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Now by default, Microsoft really only wants you to go out once per day.

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So if I were to run Update‑Help again immediately after this,

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nothing really is going to happen unless you use the ‑Force parameter.

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So if you're testing and need to make sure you get help updated,

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include the ‑Force parameter.

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‑Force will also skip any sort of version checking,

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and it will also download files that exceed 1GB in size,

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although I'm not sure I've ever really come across that.

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Now as this is running,

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you can expect when it's finished to see some errors because sometimes

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there will be links in the PowerShell help that point to a place on the

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internet or on Microsoft that don't exist.

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Maybe they're just a placeholder for future content or the link is there,

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but has not been modified.

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So we're just going to let this run here, and this may take a few more minutes.

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And when it comes back, oh, it's all finished there.

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You can see that I got some error messages there.

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So a few error messages are to be expected.

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If you get a lot of error messages,

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that means you probably are not running as administrator.

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So let's take a look here at Update‑Help, the help for us.

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So you can see that you can specify a different module.

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You can specify different cultures.

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You can specify the ‑Force.

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The More is what you get when you run the help command so that pages it.

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Get‑Help just runs the full thing without any sort of paging.

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So if you're not used to the More command, Enter just go to the next page.

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Spacebar goes to the next page.

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Sorry, Enter just goes the next line, Spacebar is next page.

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Or you can just do q to quit and get back to your prompt.

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So just to show you here, I'm going to rerun Update‑Help.

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And I'm just going to get a single module.

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And just to demonstrate, I'm going to specify the German culture,

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and I'll use the ‑Force for this to go out again.

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So this is going to go out and this failed because there

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is no content for the German culture.

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You'll find that a lot of help content pretty much defaults to the

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English US, although you can always check if you have a different

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culture. You can try specifying your particular culture.

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I don't have a culture‑specific machine to really test with or show you.

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All right, so let's clear the screen here.

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Now let's go back to our original command.

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So we're going to do Get‑Help on Get‑Service. So

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this scrolls all the way through.

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And if I scroll up here,

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you can see I now have NAME, SYNOPSIS, SYNTAX, DESCRIPTION, RELATED LINKS.

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I no longer have that same error message saying that I have to update help.

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So I now have help, and I can use it and get all the information that I need.

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Now another thing that you can do with Update‑Help is you can

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save it locally and then install it locally.

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You may want to do this if you are in a team

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environment because there's no reason for,

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you know,

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10 people to all go out to Microsoft where all you have to do is just

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save the help locally and then install it locally.

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So there is a command that you can run.

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We'll get to it here in a moment. So I'm going to save all my help

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and make a directory called help on my local hard drive. And I'm

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going to use the command Save‑Help.

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I'm going to let you look at the help eventually to see how to use this.

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But I'm going to run Save‑Help and specify the module.

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I'm just going to do a couple sample modules,

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specify the destination, and do Force because I've

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already kind of run Update‑Help once.

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So this is going out now and saving and downloading all of the

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content, all these CAB files to the local hard drive, to the

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destination that I specify. That destination could be a UNC or it

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could be some team drive or whatever you want.

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And again, there is an error message there about PSReadline,

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although if I look at the help directory,

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I can actually see that I've actually got content.

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So I'm not quite sure where that error message is coming from.

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One thing about Save‑Help though, this is very important,

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Save‑Help will only download help for modules. And in this

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case, I specified the modules.

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If I just did Save‑Help without specifying anything,

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it would then do all of the modules.

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But this is only going to install help for modules

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on my machine or, in this case, Save‑Help is what I'm running.

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Keep this in mind because if someone else then goes to

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update the help and they have a different module, they're

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not going to get the updated help.

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So that is one potential drawback.

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You kind of need to make sure that when you are saving help,

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whoever is going to be up loading or updating help from your

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source that you all have the same modules.

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So now on another machine, I could run Update‑Help. Again, the

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modules, I'm just using my samples here, specifying the source path.

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And now PowerShell, instead of going out to Microsoft or out to the

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vendor wherever the link is pointing to,

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we'll download the help files from that source path and

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then save them locally to my machine. So that really kind

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of speeds up the whole process.

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So now I can run help for get‑psreadline option, one of

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the commands on the PSReadline module. And I have

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everything there and same thing here.

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Let's look at get‑smbshare, another command from the other

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module. And I have everything that I am expecting.

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So I know now that Save‑Help worked,

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and I'm real improved much good to go. As a note, although I'm not going to

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really get into because it's not that kind of course,

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you can also use group policy to configure those source paths.

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So if you want to make sure that people are downloading

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and saving help from an internal source,

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you can configure that through group policy.

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One last thing here about Update‑Help before we move on to the next demo,

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Update and Save‑Help are version‑specific, meaning this also will work in

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Windows PowerShell. But when you do Update or Save‑Help,

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you're going to get the PowerShell 5 or 5.1 versions of help,

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not the PowerShell 7 versions.

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If by chance you still had, say,

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an old PowerShell core machine running PowerShell 6.

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something, again Update‑Help, Save‑Help is going to get that

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version‑specific help of PowerShell.

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So keep that in mind if you end up building some sort of mechanism to download and save help.