It's important to know that there are a couple of
command line interfaces or CLIs available in Windows.
The first one is called the Command Prompt, command.exe.
The second one is PowerShell or powershell.exe.
The command prompt has been around for a very long time.
It's very similar to the Command Prompt that was used in MS DOS.
Since PowerShell supports most of the same commands as Command Prompt and many,
many more, we're going to use PowerShell for the exercises in this module.
I want to call out that many PowerShell commands that we use are
actually aliases for common commands in other shells.
An alias is sort of like a nickname for a command.
The first command that we'll use is for listing files and directories.
Let's start by listing the directories in the root of our C: drive.
The C: drive is where the Windows operating system is installed.
For many of you, it might be the only hard drive that you have in your computer.
To get to the PowerShell CLI, just search in your application's list PowerShell.
From here, we can go ahead and launch the PowerShell program.
We're going to use the ls or list directory command and
give it the path of where we want to look.
The path is not actually part of the command but it is a command parameter.
You can think of parameters as a value that's associated with a command.
Now you can see all the directories in the root of your C: drive.
You might just see a few or a whole bunch of directories.
It all depends on what your computer is used for.
The C: drive root folder is what we call a parent
directory and the contents inside are considered child directories.
As you continue to work with operating systems,
you'll encounter terms that may seem a bit out of place
at first but they actually make a lot of sense.
Parents and children are common terms that stand for hierarchical relationships in OS's.
If I have a folder named dogs and a second folder nested within that folder called Corgi,
dogs would be the parent directory and Corgi would be the child directory.
Let's look at a few of the common child directories in this folder.
Program Files x86.
These directories contain most of the applications and
other programs that are installed in Windows users.
This contains the user profile directories or home directories.
Each user who logs into this Windows machine will get their own directory here.
Windows, this is where the Windows operating system is installed.
If we open a PowerShell and run Get-Help ls,
we'll see the text describing the parameters of the ls command.
This will give us a brief summary of the commands parameters.
But if you want to see more detailed help,
try Get-Help ls -Full.
Now you can see
a description of each of the parameters and some examples of how to use the command.
