Using the PowerShell 7 Console

Once you have installed PowerShell 7, you can explore the PowerShell 7 console irrespective of your installation method. In the main, the PowerShell 7 console is similar to the Windows PowerShell console, but you should notice a few differences.

Getting ready

You run this recipe on SRV1 after you have installed PowerShell 7. You can install PowerShell 7 using the installation script (as in the Installing PowerShell 7 recipe), Chocolatey (as in the Installing PowerShell 7 using Chocolatey recipe), or any other mechanism. You run this recipe in the PowerShell 7 console – pwsh.exe.

How to do it...

1. Viewing the PowerShell version

   $PSVersionTable
   

2. Viewing the $Host variable

   $Host
   

3. Looking at the PowerShell process (PWSH)

   Get-Process -Id $PID |
     Format-Custom -Property MainModule -Depth 1
   

4. Looking at resource usage statistics

   Get-Process -Id $PID |
     Format-List CPU,*Memory*
   

5. Updating the PowerShell 7 help files

   $Before = Get-Help -Name about_*
   Update-Help -Force | Out-Null
   $After = Get-Help -Name about_*
   $Delta = $After.Count - $Before.Count
   "{0} Conceptual Help Files Added" -f $Delta
   

6. Determining available commands

   Get-Command |
     Group-Object -Property CommandType
   

7. Examining the Path Variable

   $env:path.split(';') 
   

How it works...

In step 1, you view the PowerShell version information contained in $PSVersionTable, which produces output like this:

Figure 1.12: Viewing the $PSVersionTable variable

In step 2, you view the contents of the $Host variable, which contains details of the PowerShell host (i.e., the PowerShell 7 console), which looks like this:

Figure 1.13: Viewing $Host

In step 3, you view the details of the PowerShell process (pwsh.exe) with output like this:

Figure 1.14: Viewing the pwsh process

In step 4, you can observe the resources used by this process by using Get-Process and viewing the resource-related properties, with output like this:

Figure 1.15: Viewing the pwsh resource usage

It is always useful to get the most up-to-date help files, which you can do using Update-Help. In step 5, you update the PowerShell 7 help files and count the number of conceptual help files resulting from updating help. The output of this step looks like this:

Figure 1.16: Updating the PowerShell 7 help files

In step 6, you use Get-Command to determine the number of commands available to a newly installed version of PowerShell 7.2.2 (in this case!) on a freshly installed version of Windows Server 2022. The output looks like this:

Figure 1.17: Updating the PowerShell 7 help files

In the final step, step 7, you review the contents of the path environment variable, with output like this:

Figure 1.18: Viewing the available commands in PowerShell 7

There’s more...

In step 1, you examine the $PSVersion built-in variable. At the time of writing, the latest released version of PowerShell 7 is 7.2.2, as you can see in the output. However, when you run this step, you may discover you have installed a later version.

You run pwsh.exe to start PowerShell 7 via the console. PowerShell has a built-in variable, $PID, which holds the Windows process ID for the current PowerShell console. This variable can be useful if you have multiple consoles open at one time. You can use Get-Process, as shown in step 2, specifying the process ID, to get details of this PowerShell process.