1 00:00:01,130 --> 00:00:05,290 Alright, so let's look at how to use help in a little more detail here. 2 00:00:05,290 --> 00:00:08,640 So we know we can run a command like help get‑service, 3 00:00:08,640 --> 00:00:13,860 and we can see PARAMETERS, and we'll also scroll down here, 4 00:00:13,860 --> 00:00:17,540 you can see NOTES and all the examples. 5 00:00:17,540 --> 00:00:22,150 Now this is the same behavior that you can get with the help 6 00:00:22,150 --> 00:00:26,140 command that has a parameter called ‑full. 7 00:00:26,140 --> 00:00:30,920 And this will show you everything that there is about help. 8 00:00:30,920 --> 00:00:33,880 Now for some reason in PowerShell 7, 9 00:00:33,880 --> 00:00:37,620 it looks like the new default is to show you full commands, 10 00:00:37,620 --> 00:00:41,180 although I have seen some systems where it doesn't 11 00:00:41,180 --> 00:00:46,040 always show full help all the time, and I can't figure out why that is. 12 00:00:46,040 --> 00:00:50,330 So if you want to see full help, it doesn't hurt to run help, 13 00:00:50,330 --> 00:00:52,210 the name the command, ‑full, 14 00:00:52,210 --> 00:00:57,420 and then you'll know you'll always get the full help and examples. 15 00:00:57,420 --> 00:01:00,420 Those examples are very important. 16 00:01:00,420 --> 00:01:04,830 There is also an option here with the help command called ‑ShowWindow, 17 00:01:04,830 --> 00:01:09,340 and when you run this, this will display the help, 18 00:01:09,340 --> 00:01:13,170 and it doesn't always pop up here, but if I look behind here, 19 00:01:13,170 --> 00:01:17,310 I have a graphical window, let's make this bigger. 20 00:01:17,310 --> 00:01:24,660 What's nice here is that you can zoom in and make the font size bigger. 21 00:01:24,660 --> 00:01:28,060 There is like search, so I wanted to say search for name, 22 00:01:28,060 --> 00:01:30,840 you can say get some nice highlighting. 23 00:01:30,840 --> 00:01:31,930 Now the output, 24 00:01:31,930 --> 00:01:34,640 and the way that this is displayed may be different 25 00:01:34,640 --> 00:01:39,230 than what you see on the screen, so the order isn't always the same, 26 00:01:39,230 --> 00:01:41,370 and you can control or filter, 27 00:01:41,370 --> 00:01:45,360 you know what types of help content that you want to see. 28 00:01:45,360 --> 00:01:51,380 It's a really handy a little tool because you can do help ‑ShowWindow, 29 00:01:51,380 --> 00:01:53,870 pull the window if you have multiple monitors, 30 00:01:53,870 --> 00:01:56,750 pull this little display over to one monitor, 31 00:01:56,750 --> 00:01:59,050 and then you have your other monitor to be working, 32 00:01:59,050 --> 00:02:01,200 so you can look, you can look back and forth. 33 00:02:01,200 --> 00:02:04,110 I find that really quite helpful. 34 00:02:04,110 --> 00:02:06,480 I feel like there's lots of gotchas or potential 35 00:02:06,480 --> 00:02:08,840 gotchas I got to tell you about, but yeah, 36 00:02:08,840 --> 00:02:09,490 there are. 37 00:02:09,490 --> 00:02:14,940 So one thing about the ‑ShowWindow is that, 38 00:02:14,940 --> 00:02:18,820 remember I mentioned earlier that all the PowerShell help gets 39 00:02:18,820 --> 00:02:22,840 formatted in these kind of fancy XML files. 40 00:02:22,840 --> 00:02:28,990 When you do ‑ShowWindow, PowerShell kind of has to massage or reformat that 41 00:02:28,990 --> 00:02:34,670 XML data to display properly in this graphical display. 42 00:02:34,670 --> 00:02:38,740 Sometimes the XML gets a little mangled, 43 00:02:38,740 --> 00:02:40,170 gets a little torqued, 44 00:02:40,170 --> 00:02:44,090 and PowerShell, from the console, usually can display just fine, but 45 00:02:44,090 --> 00:02:49,950 sometimes you'll get kind of weird things with help when you're using 46 00:02:49,950 --> 00:02:55,080 ‑ShowWindow. So just be aware of that. I think I have a demo of that a 47 00:02:55,080 --> 00:02:59,990 little bit later. So let's close that, and let's come back to the prompt 48 00:02:59,990 --> 00:03:03,820 here, and let's do help get‑process. 49 00:03:03,820 --> 00:03:07,740 Here's another example, we can see I'm getting NAME, SYNTAX, 50 00:03:07,740 --> 00:03:12,340 SYNOPSIS, DESCRIPTION, then all the parameters. 51 00:03:12,340 --> 00:03:14,320 Well sometimes what you might want to do though, 52 00:03:14,320 --> 00:03:15,160 is say, you know, 53 00:03:15,160 --> 00:03:18,600 I don't need to see all that, I'm just curious about a particular 54 00:03:18,600 --> 00:03:22,180 parameter. So you can run help name of the command, let's go back to 55 00:03:22,180 --> 00:03:26,710 get‑service, say just show me all the name parameter. 56 00:03:26,710 --> 00:03:30,960 Now I can see, and focus really just on that parameter. 57 00:03:30,960 --> 00:03:36,180 So the name parameter specifies the service name of the service to be retrieved. 58 00:03:36,180 --> 00:03:41,640 Okay, that seems pretty simple, and wild cards are allowed. 59 00:03:41,640 --> 00:03:42,610 Now you can also, 60 00:03:42,610 --> 00:03:45,360 with the ‑ parameter, you can also use wild cards 61 00:03:45,360 --> 00:03:46,990 that actually, as part of the name. 62 00:03:46,990 --> 00:03:48,810 So say hey, 63 00:03:48,810 --> 00:03:53,580 for get‑service, show me all the parameters that are *name. 64 00:03:53,580 --> 00:03:57,690 So, I can see I get ‑DisplayName and ‑Name. 65 00:03:57,690 --> 00:04:02,330 So let's clear the screen here, and the last thing to show you here with get 66 00:04:02,330 --> 00:04:08,850 help are the examples. You saw when you do ‑Full, you get all the examples, if 67 00:04:08,850 --> 00:04:12,390 all you want to see are the examples, just do help, 68 00:04:12,390 --> 00:04:15,980 the name the command, and then ‑Examples. 69 00:04:15,980 --> 00:04:18,170 This then shows you, so it gives you the name of 70 00:04:18,170 --> 00:04:20,240 synopsis, but then it will go through, 71 00:04:20,240 --> 00:04:22,760 and PowerShell will display just the example. 72 00:04:22,760 --> 00:04:27,000 So you can see how do I use this particular command. 73 00:04:27,000 --> 00:04:30,440 That could be really quite handy. 74 00:04:30,440 --> 00:04:34,800 Another potential gotcha though, the quality of the help and the number of those 75 00:04:34,800 --> 00:04:38,850 examples really depend upon the team or the author who is responsible for that 76 00:04:38,850 --> 00:04:43,440 cmdlet or the documentation. Now here's an example of a command that I have, I 77 00:04:43,440 --> 00:04:46,900 expect you do too, enable‑storagebusdisk. 78 00:04:46,900 --> 00:04:54,290 And if I do ‑full help, you can see there's the SYNTAX and PARAMETERS. 79 00:04:54,290 --> 00:05:00,260 There's no DESCRIPTION, and there are no examples, so there's nothing I can do. 80 00:05:00,260 --> 00:05:02,860 If I need more information about how to use this command, 81 00:05:02,860 --> 00:05:05,530 I'm gonna have to go online and asking people, hey, 82 00:05:05,530 --> 00:05:09,010 I don't understand this particular parameter or whatever because 83 00:05:09,010 --> 00:05:12,840 the help documentation is not fully fleshed out. 84 00:05:12,840 --> 00:05:16,400 It's unfortunate that some commands, for whatever reason, 85 00:05:16,400 --> 00:05:20,270 don't have all the help that other commands do, but the only 86 00:05:20,270 --> 00:05:22,370 way you're going to know that is by looking. 87 00:05:22,370 --> 00:05:27,750 Just don't be surprised if you don't see what you are 88 00:05:27,750 --> 00:05:33,670 expecting. Now PowerShell will generate pretty much basic help 89 00:05:33,670 --> 00:05:36,620 based on command metadata and parameters, 90 00:05:36,620 --> 00:05:40,790 so you should always at least be able to see, when you do help for a command, 91 00:05:40,790 --> 00:05:44,570 even if has no documentation shipping with it, it should still at 92 00:05:44,570 --> 00:05:47,780 least show you the syntax, so you can see what the parameters are 93 00:05:47,780 --> 00:05:49,990 and how to use that particular command. 94 00:05:49,990 --> 00:05:57,000 You just may not get all the extra bonuses with parameter information and examples.