Q840410

PowerShell is a shell program developed by Microsoft for task automation and configuration management. As is typical for a shell, it provides a command-line interpreter for interactive use and a script interpreter for automation via a language defined for it. Originally only for Windows, known as Windows PowerShell, it was made open-source and cross-platform on August 18, 2016, with the introduction of PowerShell Core. The former is built on the .NET Framework and the latter on .NET (previously .NET Core).

Key facts

Programming language.name: PowerShell
Programming language.logo: PowerShell Core 6.0 icon.png
Programming language.logo size: 150px
Programming language.screenshot: PowerShell 7.5.png
Programming language.screenshot size: 250px
Programming language.screenshot caption: Screenshot of a PowerShell 7.5.0 session in Windows Terminal
Programming language.paradigm: Imperative, pipeline, object-oriented, functional and reflective
Programming language.designer: Jeffrey Snover, Bruce Payette, James Truher (et al.)
Programming language.developer: Microsoft
Programming language.latest preview version: 7.6.0-rc.1
Programming language.typing: Strong, safe, implicit and dynamic

~43 min read

Article

42 sections

Contents

Background
Kermit
Monad
PowerShell
Pash
Design
Philosophy
Grammar
Named commands
Extended Type System
Cmdlets
Pipeline
Scripting
Hosting
Desired State Configuration
Versions
Project Monad
Windows PowerShell
1.0
2.0
3.0
4.0
5.0
5.1
PowerShell Core
6.0
6.1
6.2
PowerShell
7.0
7.2
7.3
7.4
7.5
7.6
Comparison of cmdlets with similar commands
Filename extensions <span class="anchor" id="Extensions"></span>
Application support
See also
References
Further reading
External links

PowerShell is bundled with current versions of Windows and can be installed on macOS and Linux. Since Windows 10 build 14971, PowerShell replaced Command Prompt as the default command shell exposed by File Explorer.