Powershell Tutorial for Beginners: Learn in 1 Day

1. What is PowerShell?
Windows PowerShell is object-oriented automation engine and scripting language. It is
designed mainly for the system administrators. It helps IT, professionals, to control & automate
the administration of the Window OS and other applications.
It introduced some compelling new concepts that enable you to extend the knowledge you have
gained and the scripts that you have created within the Windows Command Prompt and
Windows Script Host environments.
It combines the flexibility of scripting, command-line speed, and the power of a GUI-based
admin tool. It allows you to solve problems efficiently by helping system admins to eliminate
future manual labor hours. We will go through all the important aspect which you should know to
learn PowerShell.
2. Why Use Powershell?
Here, are some important reason for using Powershell:

• Powershell offers a well-integrated command-line experience for the operation system

• PowerShell allows complete access to all of the types in the .NET framework
• Trusted by system administrators.
• PowerShell is a simple way to manipulate server and workstation components
• It's geared toward system administrators by creating a more easy syntax
• PowerShell is more secure than running VBScript or other scripting languages

3. PowerShell History
PowerShell first version 1.0 was released in 2006. Today, PowerShell is at version 5.1. As the
year and version gone by, PowerShell's capabilities and hosting environments grew
significantly.
Let See Version wise History of Powershell:

• PowerShell version 1 supported the local administration of Windows Server 2003

• PowerShell 2.0 was integrated with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. This
version supports for remoting and enhances the capabilities of PowerShell like
transactions, background jobs, events, debugging, etc.
• PowerShell 3.0 was released as an internal part of the Windows management
framework. It was installed on Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. You can add and
scheduled jobs, session connectivity, automatic module loading, etc.
• PowerShell 4.0 was shipped with Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2. In this
version added support for desired state configuration, enhanced debugging, network
diagnostics.

1|Page
 • PowerShell 5.0 was released as internal part of Windows management framework 5.
The feature offers in this version are remote debugging, class definitions, .NET
enumerations, , etc.

4. Features of Powershell
• PowerShell Remoting: PowerShell allows scripts and cmdlets to be invoked on a remote
machine.
• Background Jobs: It helps you to invoked script or pipeline asynchronously. You can run
your jobs either on the local machine or multiple remotely operated machines.
• Transactions: Enable cmdlet and allows developers to perform
• Evening: This command helps you to listen, forwarding, and acting on management and
system events.
• Network File Transfer: Powershell offers native support for prioritized, asynchronous,
throttled, transfer of files between machines using the Background Intelligent Transfer
Service (BITS) technology.

5. How to launch PowerShell

PowerShell is pre-installed in all latest versions of Windows. We need to launch PowerShell for
that we need to follow the given steps:
Step 1) Search for PowerShell in Windows. Select and Click

Step 2) Power Shell Window Opens

2|Page
 6. PowerShell Cmdlet
A cmdlet which is also called Command let is a is a lightweight command used in the Window
base PowerShell environment. PowerShell invokes these cmdlets in the command prompt. You
can create and invoke cmdlets command using PowerShell APIS.
7. Cmdlet vs. Command:
Cmdlets are different from commands in other command-shell environments in the following
manners −
Cmdlets are .NET Framework class objects It can't be executed separately
Cmdlets can construct from as few as a dozen lines of code
Parsing, output formatting, and error presentation are not handled by cmdlets
Cmdlets process works on objects. So, text stream and objects can't be passed as output for
pipelining
Cmdlets are record-based as so it processes a single object at a time
Most of the PowerShell functionality comes from Cmdlet's which is always in verb-noun format
and not plural. Moreover, Cmdlet's return objects not text. A cmdlet is a series of commands,
which is more than one line, stored in a text file with a .ps1 extension.
A cmdlet always consists of a verb and a noun, separated with a hyphen. Some of the verbs
use for you to learn PowerShell is:
Get — To get something
Start — To run something
Out — To output something
Stop — To stop something that is running
Set — To define something
New — To create something

3|Page
 8. PowerShell commands
Following is a list of important PowerShell Commands:
Get-Help: Help about PowerShell commands and topics
Example: Display help information about the command Format-Table
Get-Help Format-Table

Get-Command: Get information about anything that can be invoked

Example: To generate a list of cmdlets, functions installed in your machine
Get-Command

4|Page
Get-Service: Finds all cmdlets with the word 'service' in it.
Example: Get all services that begin with "vm"
Get-Service "vm*"

Get- Member: Show what can be done with an object

Example: Get members of the vm processes.
Get-Service "vm*" | Get-Member

Other Commands:
Get Module Shows packages of commands
Get Content This cmdlet can take a file and process its contents and do something with it

5|Page
Get- get Finds all cmdlets starting with the word 'get-
Example: Create a Folder
New-Item -Path 'X:\Guru99' -ItemType Directory
Output

6|Page
 9. Powershell Data types:

10. Special Variables

Special Variable Description

$Error An array of error objects which display the most recent errors

$Host Display the name of the current hosting application

$Profile Stores entire path of a user profile for the default shell

7|Page
$PID Stores the process identifier

$PSUICulture It holds the name of the current UI culture.

$NULL Contains empty or NULL value.

$False Contains FALSE value

$True Contains TRUE value

11. PowerShell Scripts

Powershell scripts are store in .ps1 file. By default, you can't run a script by just double-clicking
a file. This protects your system from accidental harm. To execute a script:
Step 1: right-click it and click "Run with PowerShell."

Moreover, there is a policy which restricts script execution. You can see this policy by running
the Get-ExecutionPolicy command.
You will get one of the following output:
Restricted— No scripts are allowed. This is the default setting, so it will display first time when
you run the command.
AllSigned— You can run scripts signed by a trusted developer. With the help of this setting, a
script will ask for confirmation that you want to run it before executing.
RemoteSigned— You can run your or scripts signed by a trusted developer.
Unrestricted— You can run any script which you want to run
Steps to Change Execution Policy
Step 1) Open an elevated PowerShell prompt. Right Click on PowerShell and "Run as
Administrator"

8|Page
Step 2) Enter the Following commands
Get-ExecutionPolicy
Set-execution policy unrestricted
Enter Y in the prompt
Get-ExecutionPolicy

12. First PowerShell Script

In a notepad write the following command
Write-Host "Hello, Guru99!"
PowerShell Scripts have an extension ps1. Save the file as FirstScript.ps1

In Powershell, call the script using the command

& "X:\FirstScript.ps1"

9|Page
 13. What is PowerShell ISE?
The Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment(ISE) is the default editor for
Windows PowerShell. In this ISE, you can run commands, writer test, and debug scripts in an in
a window base GUI environment. You can do multiline editing, syntax coloring, tab completion,
selective execution and lots of other things.
Windows PowerShell ISE also allows you to run commands in a console pane. However, it also
supports panes that you can use to simultaneously view the source code of your script and
other tools which you can plug into the ISE.
You can even open up multiple script windows at the same time. This is specifically useful when
you are debugging a script which uses functions defined in other scripts or modules.

The same script we created in notepad, can be created in ISE

Paste code into the editor
Save Script
Use F5 to run the script
Observe output in the console

10 | P a g e
Sample 2:
The following code will give the Free Virtual Memory in your machine
Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_OperatingSystem –ComputerName localhost |
Select-Object -Property CSName,FreeVirtualMemory

11 | P a g e
 14. PowerShell Concepts

Cmdlet are build-command written in .net languages like VB or C#. It

Cmdlets allows developers to extend the set of cmdlets by loading and write
PowerShell snap-ins.

Functions are commands written in the PowerShell language. It can be

Functions
developed using other IDE like Visual Studio and devs.

Scripts Scripts are text files on disk with a .ps1 extension

Applications Applications are existing windows programs.

Tells the cmdlet not to execute, but to tell you what would happen if the
What if
cmdlet were to run.

Confirm Instruct the cmdlet to prompt before executing the command.

Verbose Gives a higher level of detail.

Debug Instructs the cmdlet to provide debugging information.

Instructs the cmdlet to perform a specific action when an error occurs.

ErrorAction
Allowed actions continue, stop, silently- continue and inquire.

ErrorVariable It specifies the variable which holds error information.

OutVariable Tells the cmdlet to use a specific variable to hold the output information

Instructs the cmdlet to hold the specific number of objects before calling
OutBuffer
the next cmdlet in the pipeline.

15. Advantages of using PowerShell script

PowerShell scripts are really powerful and could do much stuff in fewer lines.
Variables are declared in the form $<variable>
Variables could be used to hold the output of command, objects, and values.
"Type" of a variable need not be specified.

12 | P a g e
 16. PowerShell Vs. Command Prompt

PowerShell Command Prompt

Command Prompt is a default command line

PowerShell deeply integrates with the interface which provided by Microsoft. It is a
Windows OS. It offers an interactive command simple win32 application that can interact and
line interface and scripting language. talk with any win32 objects in the Windows
operating system.

PowerShell uses what are known as cmdlets. It

can be invoked either in the runtime No such features offer by command prompt.
environment or the automation scripts.

PowerShell considers them as objects. So the Command Prompt or even the *nix shell, the
output can be passed as an input to other output generated from a cmdlet is not just a
cmdlets through the pipeline. stream of text but a collection of objects.

The PowerShell is very advanced regarding

Command prompt is very basic.
features, capabilities and inner functioning.

17. Applications of Powershell

Today, PowerShell has become an ideal choice for IT administrators as it eases management
operation and effort in large corporate networks. For example, let's assume that you are
managing a large network which contains more than four hundred servers. Now you want to
implement a new security solution. This security solution depends on a certain service which
needs to run on those servers.
You can surely log in to each server and see if they have that service installed and running or
not. However, it certainly takes a lot of human errors as your staff needs to spend lots of time on
this non-productive process.
However, if you use PowerShell, then you could complete this task in just a few minutes. That's
because the entire operation is done with a single script which gathers information about the
services running on the servers.
18. Summary
Windows PowerShell is object-oriented automation engine and scripting language

Powershell offers a well-integrated command-line experience for the operation system

PowerShell first version 1.0 was released in 2006

PowerShell allows scripts and cmdlets to be invoked on a remote machine
PowerShell is pre-installed in all latest versions of Windows
A cmdlet is a lightweight command used in the Window base PowerShell environment

13 | P a g e
Get, Start, Out, Stop, Set, New are important PowerShell commands
Boolean, Byte, Chat, Decimal, Decimal, Long are important Data Type of PowerShell
$Error. $Host, $Profile, $PID, $PSUICulture, $NULL are some special variable used in
PowerShell
The Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment(ISE) is the default editor for
PowerShell
PowerShell deeply integrates with the Windows OS whereas Command Prompt is a default
command line interface which provided by Microsoft
PowerShell has become an ideal choice for IT administrators as it eases management operation
and effort in large corporate networks

14 | P a g e