Why is my "help" command in Windows 11 Home powershell not giving a list of other commands to use with the "helped command"?

Question

I am learning how to use the PS and whenever I use the "help" cmd, it does not display other commands. My PS is shown in the first image, and my online course is shown in the 2nd. In the 3rd image, I have already tried update-help and the update failed. Am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

Powershell implemented aliases for commands. One reason for doing that was because users who were familiar with a command prompt were used to typing in "dir" to get a directory list. Users who mainly used Unix used the "ls" command. The Get-Alias cmdlet will list all aliases, or you can specify which alias you are interested in.

PS C:\> get-alias dir,ls
CommandType     Name                                               Version    Source
-----------     ----                                               -------    ------
Alias           dir -> Get-ChildItem
Alias           ls -> Get-ChildItem

So rather than forcing users to type out the full Get-ChildItem command, they could type in the simple 2 or 3 letter "command" that they were used to typing in.

In a Powershell prompt, all of these commands will display the same help output for Get-ChildItem. Note that "help" is a function that pipes the output of get-help to "more.com" to pause the display.

help dir
help ls
help gci
help Get-ChildItem
Get-Help dir
Get-Help ls
Get-Help gci
Get-Help Get-ChildItem
 

Also note the other options.

REMARKS
    To see the examples, type: "get-help Get-ChildItem -examples".
    For more information, type: "get-help Get-ChildItem -detailed".
    For technical information, type: "get-help Get-ChildItem -full".
    For online help, type: "get-help Get-ChildItem -online" 
 

In a command prompt (your second image), a help command (help.exe) will display a list of commands. That is how a command prompt works. You can also run help.exe in a Powershell prompt. It will display the same output as in a command prompt. That's because in both cases you are telling cmd/PS to run a specific program.

In Powershell you can run "Get-Command" to view a list of available cmdlets, functions,

I got the same errors from Update-Help, but you should have seen a blue background when it updated the help for other commands.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/learn/ps101/01-getting-started?view=powershell-5.1

Answer 2

Hi Ghxste,

Windows has two command-line shells: CMD and PowerShell. In your first screenshot, help the built-in help function of PowerShell and dir is just the alias of the Get-ChildItem cmdlet. In your second screenshot, help is the executable help.exe and dir is a built-in command of CMD. If you want to use help.exe in PowerShell you can run help.exe dir.

Best Regards,

Ian Xue

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