Windows PowerShell

Day 1: Firing up the Windows PowerShell Command Shell

Welcome Guys! Let’s start with a light session today.

Today we will learn launching the PowerShell & executing few basic cmdlets (Sounds odd, ok, for now read cmdlets as Commands). Windows PowerShell 2 doesn’t ship with any of the Windows operating systems except Windows 7; so we need to install it (from MS site). Windows PowerShell 2 can be installed on both the x86 and x64 platforms of Windows XP with SP3, Windows Server 2003 with SP2, Windows Vista with SP1, Windows Server 2008, and Windows 7(already installed).

If you have Win7 system, type PowerShell in search bar of start menu or follow %windir%\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\PowerShell_ISE.exe or even better Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> Windows PowerShell.

It looks a lot like your old Windows command shell, except that by default the background is blue and the prompt is prefixed by PS. You can run some familiar DOS commands (such as DIR and CD), and they’ll still work, but the output might look a bit different.

Hmm! Wanna try some cmdlets (or Comands, for now).

Type Dir on Powershell and cmd, and see the difference. Try few more like date, time (time won’t work!!). Surprised? Is powershell is just another cmd? We will try to answer this in coming weeks.

These days I am writing for my Project’s daily digest. I picked up PowerShell because I think people will like reading light subjects, rather than hard and conventional stuffs, in newsletters.

Here is my first article (Publishing date: 07th Dec: ADD Volume 7 – Issue 1)

My first encounter with UNIX was a daunting experience. Before that, my perception of an operating system was based on windows. Frankly speaking, at that point of time, I hated the command based approach of UNIX. And throughout my PRP training at Wipro, UNIX classes always remained in a mess. But later I came to know the various advantages of command-based approach & Scripting skills.

Well, most of the people think COMMAND.COM and cmd.exe as twins of UNIX command shells. They include only a handful of basic commands, and most people easily conclude that scripting in windows is awkward as compare to UNIX.

But that’s not true Guys! In the past, MS attempted to come up with powerful shells & scripting engines, such as ‘Windows Script Host’ (WSH, type cscript.exe at cmd), netsh & WMIC. At last, MS came up with ‘Windows PowerShell’ (PS). PS introduced a new, more powerful, more flexible, more consistent object-based command line tool & scripting language. It is currently available for XP SP2/SP3, Windows 2003, and Vista; and included in WS08 as an optional feature. The present version, PS 2.0 was released with win7 and 2K8 R2.

From the next week, we will try to learn few basic of PS.

Hmmm, lets see Public response!!