Prof. Powershell

Command Performance

The Get-Command cmdlet reveals all that you need to know about PowerShell.

• By Jeffery Hicks
• 12/03/2008

A terrific PowerShell feature is its ability to reveal its capabilities to you through help files and cmdlets like Get-Member. There is another cmdlet you'll want to explore that can also reveal a lot about PowerShell, called Get-Command. If you run Get-Command at a PowerShell prompt, by default it will display all of the cmdlets available in your current PowerShell session.

But Get-Command can do much more. It can also display other "executables" like applications and scripts. Try this in your PowerShell session:

PS C:\> Get-command -commandtype application

The command might run for a while, but it will display all non-PowerShell programs including .exe, .dll and .txt files that are in your environment path.

Want to see all the functions currently defined? You can use Get-Command:

PS C:\> Get-command -commandtype function

The other command type you might be interested in is "externalscript":

PS C:\> Get-command -commandtype externalscript

This will list all PowerShell scripts that exist in any directory in your path. But wait...there's more.

You should be familiar with the cmdlets Verb-Noun naming convention. Curious about all the cmdlets that start with the verb "Get"?

PS C:\> get-command -verb get

Or perhaps you want to see all the cmdlets related to processes:

PS C:\> get-command -noun process

Here's a nifty trick to get a list of all the verbs and nouns. Try these commands to see for yourself:

PS C:\> get-command | select verb -unique

PS C:\> get-command | select noun -unique

You should get a list of verbs and a list of nouns.

Finally, try a command like this:

PS C:\> get-command get-process | select *

You should get all the information about Get-Process that Get-Command can tell you. One of the properties you'll notice is PSSnapin. You can use Get-Command to discover what cmdlets belong to a particular snapin. One way you can accomplish this is to use the -pssnapin parameter:

PS C:\> get-command -pssnapin Microsoft.PowerShell.Utility

Or use Get-Command to build a report for all your snapins:

PS C:\> get-command | sort pssnapin | format-table -groupby pssnapin Name

So the next time you're trying to figure out what cmdlets you have or what they can do, take command with Get-Command.