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PowerShell Aliases ＆ Finding Commands

Xah Lee, 2009-07

Understanding Aliases

PowerShell commands are usually long. For example: Get-ChildItem. However, PowerShell has aliases. For example, “dir” is the same as “Get-ChildItem”. You can create your own aliases.

Working in PowerShell, you'll find yourself needing to know:

• What are existing aliases?
• What is a given cmdlet's aliases?
• What is the cmdlet name for a known alias?
• How to set aliases?
• How to remove or edit a alias?

Show Existing Aliases

# show existing aliases
get-alias

# list all aliases ending in r
get-alias *r

Finding The Cmdlet Of A Given Alias

# find the cmdlet of alias “dir”
get-alias dir

# or, simply use help
help dir

Finding A Cmdlet's Aliases

# find the aliases of Get-Childitem
get-alias -definition get-childitem

Note that the above won't return functions. For example, typing “get-alias” will show “help” as a alias for “Get-Help”. However, “get-alias -definition Get-Help” will return a error. This is because, technically, “help” is the name of a function, not alias.

Finding Functions

# list all functions
dir function:*

Sample output:

CommandType     Name                            Definition                     
-----------     ----                            ----------                     
Function        prompt                          $(if (test-path variable:/PS...
Function        TabExpansion                    ...                            
Function        Clear-Host                      $space = New-Object System.M...
Function        more                            param([string[]]$paths)...     
Function        help                            ...                            
Function        mkdir                           ...                            
Function        Enable-PSRemoting               ...                            
Function        Disable-PSRemoting              ...                            
Function        A:                              Set-Location A:                
Function        B:                              Set-Location B:                
Function        C:                              Set-Location C:                
Function        D:                              Set-Location D:                
Function        E:                              Set-Location E:                
Function        F:                              Set-Location F:                
...
Function        cd..                            Set-Location ..                
Function        cd\                             Set-Location \                 

Finding Commands

PowerShell has over 200 cmdlets and functions. Often, you need to know if there's a command that does what you want. You can search them by Get-Command.

# list all cmdlets whose name has z
# Get-Command has alias gcm
gcm *z*

# list all aliases whose name starts with s
gcm -commandtype alias s*

Creating A Alias

# creating a new alias xx for get-childitem
new-alias xx get-childitem

Alias works only in the current session. To create perm alias, put them in your PowerShell init file. e.g.: 〔C:\Users\xah\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1〕.

To see your config, type:

# show all aliases
Get-Variable profile | Format-List