2 Meet PowerShell

 

This chapter is all about getting you situated and helping you to decide which PowerShell interface you’ll use (yes, you have a choice). If you’ve used PowerShell before, this material might seem redundant, so feel free to skim this chapter—you might still find some tidbits here and there that’ll help you down the line.

Also, this chapter applies exclusively to PowerShell on Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu 18.04. Other Linux distributions have a similar setup, but they will not be covered in this chapter. For those other installation instructions, you can get them right from PowerShell’s GitHub page at https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell#.

Useful terms

We should define a few terms that we will use quite a bit in this chapter.

PowerShell—Refers to the 7.x version that you have installed.

Shell —A shell is basically an application that can accept text-based commands and is commonly used to interact with your computer or other machines via a script or interactive experience like a terminal. Examples of shells include Bash, fish, or PowerShell.

Terminal—A terminal is an application that can run a shell application within it so that a user can interact with the shell in a visual way. Terminals are shell agnostic, so you can run any shell in any terminal you’d like.

Windows PowerShell—Refers to PowerShell 5.1 that comes preinstalled on your Windows 10 device.

2.1 PowerShell on Windows

2.2 PowerShell on macOS

2.2.1 Installation on macOS

2.3 PowerShell on Linux (Ubuntu 18.04)

2.3.1 Installation on Ubuntu 18.04

2.4 Visual Studio Code and the PowerShell extension

2.4.1 Installing Visual Studio Code and the PowerShell extension

2.4.2 Getting familiar with Visual Studio Code

2.4.3 Customizing Visual Studio Code and the PowerShell extension

2.5 It’s typing class all over again