Windows 7 / Getting Started

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Getting Help on PowerShell

You'll find a rich set of help available to you within PowerShell. What I've found is that many people are uneasy about using the help provided from the command prompt or PowerShell. However, this help has become much richer in recent years.

If you overlook it, you'll be missing a lot. Here are some of the commands you can use to retrieve the available help:

Help or Get-Help This will display generic help information on how to execute help commands and their results. Both Help and Get-Help will work.

Get-Help commandName You can request help on any PowerShell command by simply typing in Help and the command name. The command can be a cmdlet, a function, or an alias.

When you request help for an alias, it provides help on the associated cmdlets. As an example, if you type in Get-Help dir, it will return help on the Get-Children cmdlet since dir is an alias for Get-Children.

Get-Help commandName -examples Examples are only a few keystrokes away just by adding the -examples switch to your Get-Help request. For example, you can use the following command to see examples with descriptions of the Get-Service command. There are several pages, so adding the More command will allow you to view a page at a time. Press the spacebar to scroll to the next page.

Get-Help Get-Service -Examples | More

Get-Help commandName -detailed The -detailed switch can be used to provide more detailed help than the basic help command. It will include examples.

Get-Help commandName -full The -full switch provides all of the available help on the topic. This will often provide more information on parameters used within the command.

Tip Many help files are available from PowerShell that provide more information about specific topics and are referred to as "about" topics For example, if you want information on the pipelines command, you can enter Help about_pipelines To see a full listing of all of these "about" topics, enter help about.