A comprehensive command line interface for Windows introduced in 2006. Included with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 and available for Vista, XP and Windows Server 2003, PowerShell is a huge improvement over the Windows command line, which evolved from DOS and uses DOS commands with some minor enhancements.
Although the PowerShell Script Language (PSL) supports common programming structures such as "if-then-else" and "while," it is generally less complicated to deal with than Microsoft scripting languages such as VBScript and JScript. Operations in PowerShell may take far fewer lines of code than in VBScript or JScript (see Windows Script Host).
A Lot of Unix; a Little DOS
PowerShell rivals the Unix command line, which allows extensive manipulation of data via commands and scripts and has been the envy of DOS and Windows programmers for decades. Unix commands are naturally part of Linux and Mac OS X, and PowerShell supports both DOS and Unix mnemonics. For example, to list file names in PowerShell, both dir (DOS) and ls (Unix) can be used.
Low-Level Access and Commandlets (Cmdlets)
PowerShell uses the .NET environment and enables administrators to get to the heart of OS activities, such as listing and stopping active processes. PowerShell scripts can access the class libraries in the .NET Framework, Component Object Model (COM) and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). The more than 125 PowerShell commands, such as list, copy, move and rename, are called "commandlets" or "cmdlets" for short, and script files use .PS# extensions; the # being the version number such as .PS1. See
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