Many shells, such as the Linux Bash shell, have limited capabilities since they focus on strings as output. Plaintext output forces us to use other commands for additional functionality, such as formatting and filtering.
On the other hand, PowerShell is an object-oriented shell. Since almost everything in PowerShell is an object, including the output of commands, further data processing is much easier.
An object is a combination of variables and functions. Each object has the following:
- Properties: variables that describe the object (characteristics)
- Methods: functions that describe how to use the object (actions)
Each object is an instance of a blueprint called a type, or class.
Let us describe these terms using a real-world example. Assume we have an object based on an animal called $dog. We can describe $dog using properties such as name, breed, age, etc. All the actions a dog can perform are methods such as speak(), eat(), play(), etc.
All information associated with an object is called a member. We can discover the members of an object with the Get-Member cmdlet. It also shows the type of an object. In the following example, the object is a string:
A more common way to use Get-Member is by piping an object to Get-Member like so:
Both approaches produce the same result.
In the following few exercises, we will dive deeper into the properties and methods of objects.
Instructions
When we pipe an object, the string "Codecademy", to Get-Member we receive the output of all the methods and properties of a string object.
Press Next to proceed to the next exercise.