A cmdlet is a PowerShell native command. It reads and writes objects, where as Unix commands read and write plain text. Try this in PowerShell: get-command ge

A cmdlet is a PowerShell native command. It reads and writes objects, where as Unix commands read and write plain text. Try this in PowerShell: get-command get-command | where CommandType -eq "alias" Notice the lack of parsing. In Unix you'd typically do this kind of thing with grep, but then you'd have to watch out that you don't accidently include the wrong rows because some other column happened to contain the string "alias" Try this: Get-Command | Out-GridView There's this thing called PowerGUI. It has a text editor for writing PS and a computer management GUI tool. It's written in PS itself. At first I wasn't too impressed, but then I noticed in the computer management thing there's an option to "view code". And then I saw how simple it is, how these nice interfaces were implemented with a trivial amount of PowerShell. Now I think PowerShell is great.