1. Getting Started

PowerShell is an interactive shell designed around ease of use and user friendliness. It sits atop your existing system and therefore has access to all commands you can run in cmd.exe, bash etc., as well as a vast selection of its own commands you can run.

Commands are provided in the form of functions or cmdlets (pronounced command-lets), which are essentially the same thing. The name of the command typically takes the form Verb-Noun, e.g. Get-Property, which should hopefully make it easy to discover the commands you wish (see Discovery).

Object-based Architecture

PowerShell is object-based, rather than text-based like bash. This means that most functions, when returning something more complex than a string or integer, will return an object which you can sort or filter, or access child objects of.

For example

$Files = Get-ChildItem # This command returns an array of files (if more than one entry found)
$Files[0]

$Files[0] # You can access an item in the array by its index

    Directory: C:\code\powershell-training-docs

Mode                 LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                 -------------         ------ ----
d----          14/07/2026    10:42                .github

$Files[0].FullName # You can access a specific property of a given object individually
C:\code\powershell-training-docs\.github

Modules

PowerShell comes preinstalled with a large selection of functions, but you can also install external modules for almost anything from the PowerShell Gallery, or make your own.

Modules can be installed by running

Install-Module SomeModule

or on later versions

Install-PSResource SomeModule

The Install-PSResource command is typically much faster, but is not available out of the box with the older version of PowerShell which comes preinstalled in Windows. You can install it by running

Install-Module PowerShellGet -Force

If you run Install-Module without a -Scope parameter it will attempt to install the module for all users, which requires elevated privileges. If you do not have these privileges you can install the module for your user only by running Install-Module SomeModule -Scope CurrentUser.

Case Sensitivity

PowerShell, even when run on a case-sensitive operating system like MacOS, is case-insensitive. This means that all command names, parameters and values are case-insensitive. For example, the following commands are all equivalent:

Get-Property -PropertyName MyProperty
get-property -propertyname myproperty
GET-PROPERTY -PROPERTYNAME MYPROPERTY

If you need to filter objects or similar using a case sensitive match, this is also supported, and remember that the data you pass to APIs, such as Akamai, can be case-sensitive.