Get-Help - Powershell 4.0 CmdLet

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Get-Help

Short description
Displays information about Windows PowerShell commands and concepts.

Syntax


Description
The Get-Help cmdlet displays information about Windows PowerShell concepts and commands, including cmdlets, functions, 
CIM commands, workflows, providers, aliases and scripts.


To get help for a Windows PowerShell command, type "Get-Help" followed by the command name, such as: Get-Help 
Get-Process. To get a list of all help topics on your system, type: Get-Help *. You can display the entire help topic 
or use the parameters of the Get-Help cmdlet to get selected parts of the topic, such as the syntax, parameters, or 
examples.


Conceptual help topics in Windows PowerShell begin with "about_", such as "about_Comparison_Operators". To see all 
"about_" topics, type: Get-Help about_*. To see a particular topic, type: Get-Help about_<topic-name>, such as 
Get-Help about_Comparison_Operators.


To get help for a Windows PowerShell provider, type "Get-Help" followed by the provider name. For example, to get help 
for the Certificate provider, type: Get-Help Certificate.


In addition to "Get-Help", you can also type "help" or "man", which displays one screen of text at a time, or 
"<cmdlet-name> -?", which is identical to Get-Help but works only for commands.


Get-Help gets the help content that it displays from help files on your computer. Without the help files, Get-Help 
displays only basic information about commands. Some Windows PowerShell modules come with help files. However, 
beginning in Windows PowerShell 3.0, the modules that come with Windows do not include help files. To download or 
update the help files for a module in Windows PowerShell 3.0, use the Update-Help cmdlet.


You can also view the help topics for Windows PowerShell online in the TechNet Library. To get the online version of a 
help topic, use the Online parameter, such as: Get-Help Get-Process -Online. You can read all of the help topics 
beginning at: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=107116.


If you type "Get-Help" followed by the exact name of a help topic, or by a word unique to a help topic, Get-Help 
displays the topic contents. If you enter a word or word pattern that appears in several help topic titles, Get-Help 
displays a list of the matching titles. If you enter a word that does not appear in any help topic titles, Get-Help 
displays a list of topics that include that word in their contents.


Get-Help can get help topics for all supported languages and locales. Get-Help first looks for help files in the 
locale set for Windows, then in the parent locale (such as "pt" for "pt-BR"), and then in a fallback locale. Beginning 
in Windows PowerShell 3.0, if Get-Help does not find help in the fallback locale, it looks for help topics in English 
("en-US") before returning an error message or displaying auto-generated help.


For information about the symbols that Get-Help displays in the command syntax diagram, see about_Command_Syntax. For 
information about parameter attributes, such as Required and Position, see about_Parameters.


TROUBLESHOOTING NOTE: In Windows PowerShell 3.0 and 4.0, Get-Help cannot find About topics in modules unless the 
module is imported into the current session. This is a known issue. To get About topics in a module, import the 
module, either by using the Import-Module cmdlet or by running a cmdlet in the module.