Using the Get-Command Cmdlet
Listing All the Windows PowerShell Cmdlets
Can’t remember the name of each and every Windows PowerShell cmdlet? Don’t worry about it; that’s one of the things Get-Command can help you with. Just type Get-Command without any additional parameters and you’ll get back a list of all the Windows PowerShell cmdlets:
Get-Command
That list will look something like this:
CommandType Name Definition
----------- ---- ----------
Cmdlet Add-Content Add-Content [-Path] <String[...
Cmdlet Add-History Add-History [[-InputObject] ...
Cmdlet Add-Member Add-Member [-MemberType] <PS...
Cmdlet Add-PSSnapin Add-PSSnapin [-Name] <String...
Cmdlet Clear-Content Clear-Content [-Path] <Strin...
Good point: that is a little hard to read, isn’t it? Try piping the results of Get-Command through the Format-List cmdlet (we’ve included the asterisk to indicate that we want back all the properties for each cmdlet):
Get-Command | Format-List *
That returns information similar to this for each cmdlet:
Name : Write-Verbose
CommandType : Cmdlet
DLL : C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.U
tility\1.0.9567.1__31bf3856ad364e35\Microsoft.PowerShell.Com
mands.Utility.dll
Verb : Write
Noun : Warning
HelpFile : Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.Utility.dll-Help.xml
PSSnapIn : Microsoft.PowerShell.Utility
ImplementingType : Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.WriteWarningCommand
ParameterSets : {__AllParameterSets}
Definition : Write-Warning [-Message] <String> [-Verbose] [-Debug] [-Erro
rAction <ActionPreference>] [-ErrorVariable <String>] [-OutV
ariable <String>] [-OutBuffer <Int32>]
Name : Write-Warning
CommandType : Cmdlet
Oh: all you really wanted was the cmdlet name? That’s easy enough; just use Select-Object to filter out all the properties except Name:
Get-Command | Select-Object name
Is this more of what you had in mind?
Name
----
Add-Content
Add-History
Add-Member
Add-PSSnapin
Clear-Content
Clear-Item
Clear-ItemProperty
Clear-Variable
Here’s a nifty way to use Get-Command. This command grabs the set of cmdlets installed on a computer and pipes that information to Get-Help. Get-Help dutifully retrieves the help topic for each cmdlet, then uses the Out-File cmdlet to save all those help topics to a file named C:\Scripts\Help.txt:
Get-Command | Get-Help | Out-File c:\scripts\help.txt
Run that command and, within a minute or so, you’ll have built yourself a document containing the on-line help available for each and every cmdlet.
| Get-Command Aliases |
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