Often while teaching PowerShell, we get into a discussion
about how someone, usually me, types this:
Get-Help Get-Date
Instead of
Get-Help –Name Get-Date
PowerShell parameters utilize positioning. Good authors of cmdlets will determine which
parameter will be the most frequently used and put that parameter in the first
position. That means if the user types a
cmdlet, they can immediately provide the data for that parameter without
calling the parameter name. Take a look
at the –Name parameter of Get-Help
-Name
Gets help about the
specified command or concept. Enter the name of a cmdlet, function, provider,
script, or
workflow, such as `Get-Member`, a conceptual topic name, such as
`about_Objects`, or an
alias, such as
`ls`. Wildcard characters are permitted in cmdlet and provider names, but you
cannot use wildcard
characters to find the names of function help and script help topics.
To get help for a
script that is not located in a path that is listed in the Path environment
variable, type the
path and file name of the script.
If you enter the
exact name of a help topic, Get-Help displays the topic contents. If you enter
a
word or word
pattern that appears in several help topic titles, Get-Help displays a list of
the
matching titles. If
you enter a word that does not match any help topic titles, Get-Help displays
a list of topics
that include that word in their contents.
The names of
conceptual topics, such as `about_Objects`, must be entered in English, even in
non-English
versions of Windows PowerShell.
Required? false
Position? 0
Default value None
Accept pipeline
input? True (ByPropertyName)
Accept wildcard
characters? false
Two things to take note of.
First of all, the type of data that this parameter accepts is
[String]. The second is the value of Position which is zero. That means if the user types the cmdlet Get-Help and then a value of the type
string, that value will be the argument for the –Name parameter.
I often stress the need for full command syntax in scripts so
everyone knows what parameters you are using but I am also guilty of using
positional parameters for my more common cmdlets like Get-Help and
Where-Object. Here is some code to help
you see the parameter in the first position and what type of data it expects. Just be forwarded, it will load all of your
modules into memory.
$Commands = Get-Command
ForEach ($CMD
in $Commands)
{
$Obj = [PSCustomObject]@{
'Cmdlet'
= $CMD.Name
'PositionOne'
= (($CMD
| Get-Help).parameters.parameter
| where position -eq 0).Name
'Type'
= (($CMD
| Get-Help).parameters.parameter| where position -eq 0).Type.Name
}
Write-OutPut
$Obj
}
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