What are cmdlets?
Cmdlets (pronounced command-lets) are the commands we use in PowerShell. They can either be entered via a terminal application or through a script. They may be script-based and constructed from other cmdlets, or they may be binary cmdlets written in C#. The cmdlets that install by default with PowerShell are binaries. Usually, cmdlets that we write ourselves or download from the internet will be script-based. Cmdlets take an input object from the pipeline, perform an action on it, and generally return an object for further processing. We will describe this in detail in Chapter 3, The PowerShell Pipeline – How to String Cmdlets Together.
Exploring cmdlet structure
We’ve already used a few cmdlets, and you may have noticed that they have a common structure: Get-Help, Get-Command, Get-Member. This is a verb-noun structure, and it’s intended to help us understand what a cmdlet does. The verb at the start tells us that in each case, these cmdlets...
