commands detail - m

    man

    The Powershell equivalent of is:

    1. get-help

    get-help has the following built-in aliases:

    • help
    • man

    There are a couple of things to note about get-help.

    There are two much-used options: -full and -examples. They both do exactly what you’d expect, I think. To give some idea of scale, on my laptop get-help get-process currently returns just over a screenful of information, wherease get-help -get-process -full returns 9 screenfuls.

    The help text can be brought up-to-date by running update-help from the command line.

    In *nix man -k allows you to search through all the man pages for mentions of a particular keyword. It returns a list of the man pages which are relevant to the word you’ve searched for. On some systems, it’s aliased to apropos. Anyway, would perhaps return lines for, say, du, df and lsvol (at the time of typing I don’t have a Linux install to hand, so I’m guessing here.)

    There’s no seperate command for this in PowerShell, because the get-help command does this by default if it doesn’t find a direct match.

    So, if you type get-help get-process you would get this:

    …whereas if you typed get-help process you would get a list of help topics related to ‘process’[1]:

    1. Name          Category Synopsis
    2. ----          -------- --------
    3. Get-Process   Cmdlet   Gets the processes that are running on the local computer or a remote computer.
    4. Start-Process Cmdlet   Starts one or more processes on the local computer.
    6. Wait-Process  Cmdlet   Waits for the processes to be stopped before accepting more input.

    more

    Powershell incorporates a more command which broadly works in the console similarly to the unix more.

    more doesn’t work in the ISE, but you can however easily scroll back through output by pressing ‘Ctrl’ and ‘Up-arrow’ at the same time. This then allows you to use all the arrow keys (as well as Ctrl-c and Ctrl-V to cut and paste) to navigate around the output from previous commands.

    The PowerShell equivalent of mv is:

    Footnotes

    [1] To be honest, I actually did get-help process | select name, category, synopsis | ft -a to tidy up the output for the e-book.

    [2] I found that in my current PowerShell installs, there wasn’t much information on more. The get-help command returned the barest of details.

    To see what the command actually does I ran: