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Comment by romwell | Hacker News Reader

I also like that a system touted for comprehensibility and discoverability has the following very commonly used command:

    Get-ChildItem

Guess what it does by looking at its name.

Correct, it lists the contents of a directory! What else could it be? Conversely, if you want to find out what "dir"/"ls" would be in PowerShell, where else would you be looking!

I like the idea of PowerShell a lot (object-oriented piping), but I hope it evolves into something with saner default aliases and better documentation, with easy things accomplished easily.

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> Correct, it lists the contents of a directory

It does so much more than that. It can display child items from any PSProvider (Get-PSProvider): defined aliases, environmental variables, defined variables, defined functions, registry nodes, X.509 certificate containers and even Active Directory paths. "FileSystem" is just one provider amongst many.

You can also `cd` to any of these providers to use them in a filesystem-like manner. e.g. `cd HKLM:\`, `cd AD:\` (if you have the ActiveDirectory module)

That's why the name is abstract. Many of the default cmdlets work on all kinds of stuff, not just bare filesystem stuff.

Conversely, if you want to find out what "dir"/"ls" would be in PowerShell, where else would you be looking

Not so hopeless (although if you ask for detailed docs it opens a browser for you,internet required):

   PS C:\Users\xxx> help ls
   
   NAME
       Get-ChildItem
    
    SYNTAX
        Get-ChildItem [[-Path] <string[]>] [[-Filter] <string>]  [<CommonParameters>]
    
        Get-ChildItem [[-Filter] <string>]  [<CommonParameters>]
    
    
    ALIASES
        gci
        ls
        dir

From a basic data structures class in college, one might recall that nodes in a tree have can have child nodes.

Filesystems, most of them anyway, are structured as trees of files and directories.

Therefore one would expect a command named "Get-ChildItem" executed against the current directory to do...?

(Aside from that, the Powershell default alias set translates both "dir" and "ls" to Get-ChildItem.)

Get-ChildItem also works on things other than directories. And Powershell understands both ls and dir!

It knows ls, but there are a lot of UNIX commands it doesn't and it isn't a true implementation, but an alias for running Get-Childitem.

Yes, the point is to get started easily if you're used to another environment, not to be able to use it as a cmd or bash replacement.

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