Windows Powershell is a scripting engine provided by Microsoft. It is a fun and easy way of automating a ton of things in your production environment. Be it monitoring your servers, your VMware environment, etc. Even if you have a little knowledge about scripting, as you have worked with C or C#, this engine would be easy to work with.
It is now being default loaded with all the latest Windows Servers (2012 onwards and also 2008 R2) and Client versions too.
The most user-friendly hosts that you would begin using are:
- powershell.exe – Interactive Command Line
- powershell_ise.exe – Interative Scripting Environment
PowerShell does have a non-interactive version of it, which is called PowerShell 7 core ( also PowerShell 6.0). It is purely a Command line.
How To start PowerShell and PowerShell ISE on Windows:
From the Start Menu
- Click on Start and type PowerShell, you will see two options Windows PowerShell ISE and Windows PowerShell
- If you need Interactive Command Line, right click Windows PowerShell and open
- If you need Interactive Scripting Environmnet, right click Windows PowerShell ISE and open
From Command Line
Open cmd.exe,
- To run Interactive Command Line, type PowerShell
- To run Interactive Scripting Environmnet, type PowerShell_ISE or just ISE
How to enable PowerShell ISE on the earlier Releases of WIndows:
- Got to Server Manager
- Click Features and then go to Add Features
- In Select Features, click Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE)
This was just the beginning of PowerShell’s install, look, and feel. In the next blog, we will explore some basic global variables and run our first command!!
Excited to learn and grow!! 🙂
PS: If you need PowerShell on macOS, Linux, etc. please refer to the Microsoft Installation Guide here.