Documentation is one of the key strengths of PowerShell. While not all modules have complete documentation, all of the modules written by Microsoft, along with the well-done third-party ones, do. By default, PowerShell itself has exhaustive documentation built within it. In this recipe, we will look at about_ topics, pick one of the topics from the output, and read more about the subject we picked.
Exploring about_ topics
Getting ready
A prerequisite to be able to fetch any output in this recipe is to update the local copy of PowerShell Help documentation. Follow the Updating and using Help recipe to update the local PowerShell Help documentation.
How to do it...
Let's begin by listing all of the about_* Help files:
- List all the about_ topics:
PS> get-help about_*
- Display the documentation about PowerShell modules:
PS> get-help about_modules
How it works...
Get-Help gives you information about cmdlets if the cmdlet is passed as an argument. In cases where you know only a part of the name of the cmdlet, you can use a combination of characters and wildcards to list out cmdlets that match the search string (about_*, in our case).
Now, we can pick the topic we would like to read about and enter that specific about_ topic. Get-Help shows the complete documentation about the topic.