NT 1310 | October 16
2014
| Phillip Wilson | Mr. Covington |

A shell script is just a text file full of commands. It must be executable. A shell script is also a computer program designed to be run by the Unix shell, a command line interpreter. The various dialects of shell scripts are considered to be scripting languages. Typical operations performed by shell scripts include file manipulation, program execution, and printing text.
Writing a shell script is much quicker than writing the equivalent code in other programming languages. The many advantages include easy program or file selection, quick start, and interactive debugging. A shell script can be used to provide sequencing and decision-making linkage around existing programs, and for moderately-sized scripts the absence of a compilation step is an advantage. Interpretive running makes it easy to write debugging code into a script and rerun it to detect and fix bugs. Non-expert users can use scripting to tailor the behavior of programs, and shell scripting provides some limited scope for multiprocessing.

Most common usage methods of PowerShell are interactive console (powershell.exe) and script files (with extension of .ps1 that is also usually executed by powershell.exe). Main features of PowerShell are: .Net integration, object pipeline, easy access to many management domains (WMI, ADSI, COM, .NET etc.) and standardization that brings easy discovery and quick learning of new features after you know base functionality. PowerShell uses special commands called cmdlets. PowerShell can also use legacy command line utilities. To provide access to hierarchical structures like file system, registry, certificate storage and so on, PowerShell uses "providers" that expose this structures in a file-system like way. External applications can host PowerShell as to use it as automation engine, and even build a graphical user interface above it. Windows PowerShell support for Microsoft Server products are enforced with Common Engineering Criteria.