Screenshot of a Windows PowerShell session
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Paradigm | Multi-paradigm: Imperative, pipeline, object-oriented, functional and reflective |
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Designed by | Jeffrey Snover, Bruce Payette, James Truher (et al.) |
Developer | Microsoft |
First appeared | November 14, 2006 |
Stable release |
5.1.14393 / August 2, 2016
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Preview release |
6.0.0 Alpha 16 / February 15, 2017
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Typing discipline | Strong, safe, implicit and dynamic |
Platform | .NET Framework, .NET Core |
OS | Windows 7 and later, macOS, CentOS, Ubuntu |
License | MIT License (but the Windows component remains proprietary) |
Filename extensions |
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Website | microsoft |
Influenced by | |
Ksh, Perl, C#, CL, DCL, SQL, Tcl, Tk,Chef, Puppet |
PowerShell (including Windows PowerShell and PowerShell Core) is a task automation and configuration management framework from Microsoft, consisting of a command-line shell and associated scripting language built on the .NET Framework. PowerShell provides full access to COM and WMI, enabling administrators to perform administrative tasks on both local and remote Windows systems as well as WS-Management and CIM enabling management of remote Linux systems and network devices. Initially a Windows component only, PowerShell was made open-source and cross-platform on 18 August 2016.
In PowerShell, administrative tasks are generally performed by cmdlets (pronounced command-lets), which are specialized .NET classes implementing a particular operation. Sets of cmdlets may be combined into scripts, executables (which are standalone applications), or by instantiating regular .NET classes (or WMI/COM Objects). These work by accessing data in different data stores, like the file system or registry, which are made available to the PowerShell runtime via PowerShell providers.
PowerShell also provides a hosting API with which the PowerShell runtime can be embedded inside other applications. These applications can then use PowerShell functionality to implement certain operations, including those exposed via the graphical interface. This capability has been used by Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 to expose its management functionality as PowerShell cmdlets and providers and implement the graphical management tools as PowerShell hosts which invoke the necessary cmdlets. Other Microsoft applications including Microsoft SQL Server 2008 also expose their management interface via PowerShell cmdlets.