Working within PowerShell

The first step to doing real work with PowerShell is getting comfortable interfacing with the platform and becoming familiar with the daily routines of working from this command-line interface, rather than relying on your mouse pointer. Here, we will explore some of the most common ways that I have seen server administrators make use of PowerShell to enhance their daily workflow.

We will be working throughout this chapter inside the version of PowerShell that comes out of the box with Windows Server 2019, PowerShell 5.1. You may have heard the news of PowerShell 7's release. If you are familiar with this and already utilizing it, everything that we discuss will work perfectly well on that updated platform. To administer a Windows Server instance, the differences between versions won't have much of a bearing. Installing PowerShell 7 will not update PowerShell 5.1, but rather they will run side by side.

PowerShell 7 is open-source and comes...