PowerShell Basics for Windows Users

Chapter 1 named PowerShell as the third of this course's own three interfaces to the same underlying system state. Chapter 6 used it in passing for winget; Chapter 7 previewed ipconfig /flushdns. This chapter is PowerShell in its own right — how it actually works, and why it's a genuinely different kind of shell from anything Bash Scripting Fundamentals already covers, not just a Windows-flavored equivalent.

PowerShell vs. cmd — Two Very Different Shells Sharing a Terminal

cmd.exe is Windows's original command interpreter, tracing back to MS-DOS — still present, still occasionally necessary for a handful of legacy batch scripts, but with no real scripting language behind it. PowerShell is a genuine scripting environment with variables, functions, and real data types. A further wrinkle worth knowing: Windows PowerShell 5.1 ships built into Windows itself, while PowerShell 7+ is a separate, cross-platform, open-source install — Windows Terminal defaults to 5.1 unless 7 has been explicitly installed and set as the default profile, a genuinely common source of "which PowerShell am I even using" confusion.

The Object Pipeline — PowerShell's Real Defining Difference

This is the single most important contrast with Bash Scripting Fundamentals's own coverage. Bash pipes plain text between commands — each command receives a stream of characters and has to parse it back into meaningful data itself, often with tools like awk or sed doing that parsing. PowerShell pipes objects — structured data with real properties — so a command receiving piped input already has direct access to named fields, with no text-parsing step required at all.

$_.WorkingSet refers directly to a named property on the process object flowing through the pipeline — no splitting a line of text on whitespace, no guessing which column holds the memory figure, the way an equivalent Bash pipeline built around ps and awk would need to.

Cmdlets & Discovery — Get-Help, Get-Command

Every built-in PowerShell command is a cmdlet, consistently named Verb-Noun — Get-Process, Stop-Service, Set-ExecutionPolicy. Get-Help <cmdlet> -Examples shows real usage examples for any cmdlet directly in the terminal; Get-Command *service* finds every cmdlet whose name contains a given word, a genuinely fast way to discover a command whose exact name isn't already known.

A First Script — and the Execution Policy Gotcha

A PowerShell script is simply a text file saved with a .ps1 extension. By default, though, Windows blocks scripts from running at all — a security measure called Execution Policy, distinct from anything covered so far in this course.

Hands-On Exercises