The magic moment is here: PowerShell becomes a cross-platform. PowerShell is now available for Windows, Linux and MacOS. PowerShell Core can be installed in parallel to Windows PowerShell. In this blog post I will show you my first steps with this new PowerShell environment.

Installing PowerShell Core 6.0

As mentioned, we have to download the package from GitHub. It’s located here:

https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell

Choose the installation package. I’m using Windows so I decided to download the Windows (x64) msi package.

Next run the installation package. Welcome to PowerShell 6.0 Core!

Accept the license agreement. Choose the destination folder and click Install.

Click on Launch PowerShell.

First Steps

It turns out, that powershell.exe is gone and replaced with pwsh.exe.

And yes, I’m in PowerShell 6.0 Core.

Get-Host

Ok, now let’s discover the commands. How much commands are there?

(Get-Command).count

425 commands. There’s a lot of them.

It’s time to take a look at the modules.

Get-Module -ListAvailable

I really miss the NetTCPIP module and some other commands. For all those who do not know these commands yet, I refer to two of my contributions:

The modern version of ping: Test-Connection

PowerShell: Check open/closed ports with Test-NetConnection

It’s also possible to start PowerShell Core from your current Windows PowerShell session.

pwsh

The Profiles

Due to the fact that there are now two types of PowerShell on the system, the profiles have also been adapted.

Note that there are now 2 folders in the users profile:

One for Core and one for Windows PowerShell.

So that’s it for today. Have fun discovering PowerShell Core 6.0