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The full guide of PowerShell that any developer needs to know – Cmdlet
Matías Creimerman - Buenos Aires, Argentina - 2019-10-07

In PowerShell (PS) a cmdlet is a process that created to execute code.

PS already has cmdlets created to execute common specific functionalities and PS users can also create their own (this cmdlets are created with .NET framework).

All cmdlets are named with a verb-noun expression like Get-Date (a common cmdlet to get current date). If you want to get the script source code you can execute:

(Get-Command Get-Date). DLL  (to get cmdlet dll source)
(Get-Command Get-Date). ImplementingType (to get cmdlet type in dll)
Then you need to open the DLL with ILSpy and look for ImplementingType command name resulted.

But this is in case on core cmdlet in the current PS version. Usually the PS users create your own cmdlet creating the script and save it with “.ps1” extension and then you can execute this cmdlet from the file importing as a cmdlet. Exists a lot of cmdlet repositories in the web for common functions or especific functionallity for particular software. But is very common that .NET developers build their own cmdlet in C# language.

PS is based on Microsoft .NET framework, so PS brings more powerful features than a simple script or command-line command. All cmdlets returns an object, so you can pass a cmdlet as a parameter or use a cmdlet result as part of a new cmdlet (pipelining) on PS,  for example:

Get-ChildItem | ForEach-Object {
Copy-Item -Path $_.FullName -destination $NewFolder;
}

(cmdlets in blue)

And look at red characters, this is a current object alias returned by loop cmdlet ForEach-Object

(we will see later in another chapter)

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