Get-Command tutorial: discover PowerShell commands
Get-Command answers the question you have most often, which is what is the command called. It searches everything available to your session: cmdlets, functions, aliases and external executables.
Documentation: Microsoft Learn
Overview
It filters the way you think about the problem. -Verb narrows by what you are doing, -Noun by what you are doing it to, and -Module by where the command comes from. Wildcards work in all of them, so Get-Command -Noun *Service* finds every command that deals with services regardless of verb.
The other use is inspection. Get-Command on a single name returns an object describing the command, including which module it came from and its full parameter list. That is how you find out whether the Get-ADUser on this machine is the real ActiveDirectory one or something a colleague wrote.
Get-Command searches only what is currently loadable. If a module is not installed, its commands will not appear, which is itself useful information.
What happens
-Noun Service asks for every command whose noun is Service, across all loaded modules. You get Get-Service, Set-Service, Start-Service, Stop-Service, Restart-Service and the others as a single list. This is how you learn a family of related commands at once rather than one at a time.
Worth remembering
- Filter with -Verb, -Noun and -Module. Wildcards work.
- Get-Command <name> tells you which module a command came from.
- It finds aliases and external executables too.
- Nothing appears for modules that are not installed.
Primary documentation
Try it
Browser simulation · fictional data; no changes to your computer.
Follow the objects
Run the command to inspect each stage.
Lists every command whose noun is Service — the whole service-management family. Sample output from PowerShell 7; your versions and rows will differ. Wondering what a returned object can do?
Show reference output
Sample output · fictional data, shaped like the real thing
Name Verb Noun Module ------------ ---- ------- ------------------------------- Get-Service Get Service Microsoft.PowerShell.Management Stop-Service Stop Service Microsoft.PowerShell.Management
Practise this
Discover service commands
Find commands with the noun Service. Return the complete command records.
The sandbox is visible now. Sign in with Google only when you run or check a task; commands and temporary files are discarded when you leave.
Run a command to inspect its result.