I live in command line on Linux, Cisco, HP, and a number of other products but for some reason it feels UnAmerican to do it on Windows. I’m coming around though. With the implementation of the Microsoft Powershell on Windows you now have a great deal of power that you may or may not have had before. For me, troubleshooting Exchange 2007 and AD, it is a blessing. However, finding the command that you need to use to get the information you want is pretty hard. I guess that’s why Microsoft created the “get-command” command for PowerShell. It is basically a search function for Powershell and will return a list of commands that you can run to get the information you need (per your search).
So lets use the command to find more about our Exchange queues (Exchange 2007 Server).
Get-Command *queue*
Which will return a list of commands that you can run from PowerShell like Get-Queue, Retry-Queue, and Suspend-Queue.
Now lets try something to do with Active Directory. Try this command.
Get-Command *User*
It’ll return a boatload of commands but you can see a few that might be useful like New-ADUser and New-ADGroup.
Hopefully this will shine some light on the still fairly new (feeling) command line power of Microsoft’s Operating Systems.