In PowerShell, drives are used to provide access to system resources such as the file system, and even the registry. In addition, as with other popular shells, you can change the prompt to customize the enviroment to meet your needs. PS also supports shortcuts and TAB autocompletion.

To display a listing of drives accessible to PS run

Get-Drive

To change directories use Set-Location C:\ There are a lot of cmdlets and remembering all of them will be pretty difficult. However, along with the already mentioned Get-Commands command, MSH supports aliases and TAB completion. Examples of aliases are: cli = Clear-Item gal = Get-Alias ri = Remove-Item See a pattern? As already mention in Part 1, you can also create aliases to map CMD shell commands to PS commands. PS also supports TAB completion. Typing Get-A and pressing the TAB key will complete the command Get-Alias.

I did mention the registry didn't I? There are two drives that are loaded with PS that map to the Registry. The two drives... HKLM = HKEY_LocalMachine HKCU = HKEY_CurrrentUser ...can be used to access and edit the registry. To edit the registry via PS you first need to set the location with (you guessed it) Set-Location HKLM:/ Next you can use Get-ChildItem to list the available sub-keys and browse from there. Once you have set the drive to HKLM:/ you can then use Set-Location (path to registry key) to drill down to a specific spot in the registry.

As you can see, PowerShell is a very intuative and powerful shell replacement.