PowerShell Version 2 or 3?
Windows 8 comes with the latest version of PowerShell 3. It contains all the features of PowerShell 2 plus a host of enhancements and additional features. Fortunately, Microsoft has kept both the versions of PowerShell in Windows 8 meaning that the user can run whichever version he likes. By default, if you go to “Run -> powershell.exe”, this will open PowerShell 3. If you want to open PowerShell 2, run the command with the following syntax:
Running PS as administrator
The first thing you should do is to run PowerShell as administrator. This is to make sure that you can update the PS help system. In Windows 8, go to Search (Windows Key + Q) and search for “PowerShell”. In the search results, right click “PowerShell” and select “run as administrator”.
The best way to see if you are running PowerShell as administrator is that the title of the PowerShell window starts from “Administrator”.
Updating help
PowerShell does not come with help system pre-installed. You need to install it using an update command. To update the help system to the latest one, issue the following command: If you are running this command for the first time, it will take some time to scan for changes and updates.
You can also download the update file on your computer and then install it on multiple computers in offline mode. For this, you can use the following command: For installing the latest update file on an offline computer, you can use the following command: The “update-help” command updates the help system every 24 hours. This means that if you run the “update-help” command multiple times in a day, it will simply run the first time and will do nothing for the next 24 hours.
Using help commands
For getting help for each command, you may use the following syntax:
For example, This will give you information about the command syntax, its synopsis and detailed description on how and when to use the command. The best thing about using help in PowerShell is that the user gets almost every kind of help needed to run a particular command. If you need real life examples about how the command is used, you may use the following syntax: For detailed information, you can use the -detailed switch instead of -examples. And for complete information, you can use -full switch. Most of the times, users tend to read the help files while they are working on the PowerShell. You can open a new window of the same help file by using the following command:
This will pop up a new graphical window with all the help in it. You can use the help along side the PowerShell window.
Getting help online
Most of the people keep on using Google for finding examples of how to use commands in PowerShell. Now that we have learnt how to use the help system to take actual help from PowerShell help, PowerShell does not leave us alone even if we want to go online for help.
To go online for help, run the following command: This will take you to the PowerShell documentation site where you will be able to get all kinds of information about all PowerShell commands. Sometimes if you have a default browser other than Internet Explorer, the above command will give an error message. In this case, you can visit the PowerShell documentation directly. After reading this article, I hope that you will be more comfortable using PowerShell. How do you use help or shortcuts in PowerShell?
