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As a quick review, there are two primary ways to find PowerShell commands.

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You can use the Get‑Command cmdlet.

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Remember, a cmdlet is just the fancy name for a compiled PowerShell command.

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I'll probably use cmdlet and command interchangeably,

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but they really mean the same thing.

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You can also use the Get‑Help command,

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which has the added benefit of showing you how to run the command.

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I'll get into these a bit later in the demos.

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PowerShell has a few command types or categories.

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The primary unit of execution is called a cmdlet.

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Now, as the name implies, think little command.

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Cmdlets are designed to do one small thing like stop a

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service or create a virtual machine.

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These are compiled programs, which means you can't view the source,

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although PowerShell is now open source, so if you have some C# skills,

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you can browse through the source files on GitHub.

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All you have to know is that when you see the word

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cmdlet that you know what that means.

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A function is very similar to a cmdlet.

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Often you can't really tell if you're running a cmdlet or a function,

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and it really doesn't matter.

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Almost all functions are written in PowerShell scripting language,

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and you can easily view the source.

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Eventually, you'll learn to create your own PowerShell functions.

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For our purposes,

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I'll refer to functions and cmdlets generally as PowerShell commands.

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Another type of command is script.

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This is a text file written with a ps1 file extension,

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and it's written using PowerShell scripting language.

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At its simplest, it is really nothing more than a fancy batch file.

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Instead of typing commands interactively,

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you can put them in the script file and just run the script.

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Of course, there's a lot more that you can do with scripting,

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but that's a whole other course.

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The last command definition is application.

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Now this is typically any program or executable that's found in

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your system path like notepad.exe or ipconfig.

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In fact,

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you can run almost any command‑line tool from a PowerShell

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prompt. Feel you need to use the netstat command? Even though

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there is a powerful equivalent,

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you can keep running netstat just like you always have.

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Now, as a transition to PowerShell, you can take this further.

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You can still run your batch and VBScript files right from a PowerShell

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prompt. Need to run something like Python or Ruby? No problem.

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If you can run it at a C prompt,

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you can most likely run it in PowerShell. One of the reasons

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that PowerShell is easy to learn, trust me,

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it really is, is because PowerShell commands follow

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a standard naming convention.

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Remember, commands mean cmdlets and functions.

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PowerShell scripts can have whatever name you want to give them.

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PowerShell commands are supposed to follow a verb‑noun naming pattern.

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The noun is the singular version of the thing that the cmdlet is working with,

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like file, service, or ACL. The verb comes from a list of standard .NET verbs,

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most of which are pretty basic like get, set, and remove.

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Now PowerShell has a command called Get‑Verb,

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which will do exactly what the name suggests.

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It will get a verb, although, as you'll see,

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it's pretty simple to get all of the verbs at the same time.

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Now, let me point out that this naming convention is not a hard and fast rule.

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It is possible for someone to make a PowerShell command

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called something like Erase‑Files.

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That name does not follow the rules.

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Fortunately, the PowerShell team at Microsoft does follow the naming guidelines,

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and a lot of other people who make cmdlets do follow those rules, so it is much

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easier to find or even guess the name of commands because of this naming

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convention. There is another way commands can be called,

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and that is by an alias.

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Now,

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an alias is technically nothing more than an alternate name for a

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command. Under the hood and technically speaking,

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this is just another command type to go along with function and cmdlet.

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But aliases tend to be easier to use.

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They're often shorter, which means less typing,

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which a lot of people like. Aliases often exist also as transition tools.

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For example, in PowerShell, you can use the dir command to list files,

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just as you did from a dos or cmd prompt.

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But you aren't really running the dir command.

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You are running a PowerShell command called Get‑ChildItem.

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Using the dir alias makes things a little bit easier for you till

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you learn the PowerShell way to list files.

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How do you think you could get a list of aliases in PowerShell?

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Well, yeah, it's really that easy, and I'll cover all of this and more a little bit later in the demonstrations.