Chapter 14. Simple help: making a comment

 

One of the things we all love about PowerShell is its help system. Like Linux’s man pages, PowerShell’s help files can provide a wealth of information, examples, instructions, and more. So we definitely want to provide help with the tools we create—and you should, too. You have two ways of doing so. First, you can write full PowerShell help that consists of external, XML-formatted Microsoft Assistance Markup Language (MAML) files, which can even include versions for different languages. This is an advanced topic that we won’t cover in this book. In fact, with the advent of modules like PlatyPS, you won’t ever have to learn MAML. For now, we’re going to use the simpler, single-language, comment-based help that lives right inside your function.

14.1. Where to put your help

There are three legal places where PowerShell will look for your specially formatted comments, in order to turn them into help displays:

14.2. Getting started

14.3. Going further with comment-based help

14.4. Broken help

14.5. Beyond comments

14.6. Your turn