Beginner’s Commands for PowerShell

There are a few commands in PowerShell that will help you right off the bat.

Checking the status of a setting or property

Most of the time when I’m using PowerShell it’s because I need to first look something up, then make a change. We don’t normally just start making changes all willy-nilly, so knowing how to see the properties and changes is the first step in determining how you plan to make a change.

Format-List

Let’s say, for instance, you want to know the ID of a service. Your first command will be:

But that will list all of the properties of all of the services:

If you want to see just one of the properties, such as the display name, then you’d send the get-service through the “pipeline” with a Format-List. You can start with formatting the list using the property, only showing the property you want. In this case it will be “displayname”

This will show only the property “displayname” as shown below:

You can do multiple properties:

Will show you the displayname and that status:

The more properties you have available, the more options you can see and things you can change based on the commandlets.

But what if I don’t know the properties? get-member to the rescue:

get-member will show you everything property an item has you can format the list with. Here’s how it’s used:

This shows you all of the available properties:

That doesn’t mean that all of these properties have values in them. For example if you did this:

It may return blank.

And don’t forget, you can write these commands faster when you learn the shortened syntax of some of the commands.

For example this:

Will give you the same as it’s lengthier command:

I hope this helps a little bit. There’s a lot more to finding what you need before acting on it, but it’s a better idea to first find a way to look something up for actually changing something.