Introduction to PowerShell 7 – What It Is and How to Get It
Quite simply, PowerShell is a time machine. Not a science-fiction time machine where you get to go back in time and meet your own grandfather, but a real, practical one. If you put in a small amount of time, then PowerShell, like any simple machine, will act as a force multiplier; it will produce very much more time for you. To use a metaphor, it’s a time hammer, and the hours you put into learning PowerShell will save you tens or hundreds of times as many hours once you start putting the knowledge to use.
This chapter is a general introduction to PowerShell 7. It’s going to give you some context about PowerShell and get you up and running. You’re going to learn what you can do with it and some typical use cases. We’ll be installing PowerShell, and you’ll get to choose one or more ways of doing that. Once we’ve got it installed, we’ll go through how you run commands (called cmdlets), and how you can find cmdlets to run. Finally, and quite importantly, we’ll work through how to get help, both with cmdlets and with PowerShell topics and concepts.
In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:
- What is PowerShell 7?
- What is PowerShell 7 used for?
- Getting PowerShell 7
- Running PowerShell 7
- Getting help
