PowerShell help files

Help files are the best way to get help (pun intended) in PowerShell. They provide the most intensive details about the cmdlet and includes overviews, detailed explanations, examples, and much more. As its name suggests, you get help by running the Get-Help cmdlet.

For people out there who love *NIX, Get-Help is the equivalent of man pages in the Linux or Unix environment. Actually, an alias of man à Get-Help exists in PowerShell (thanks to Brian Wuchner for pointing this out).

The first thing that you notice in PowerShell 3.0 onward is that all the help files are not included as part of the package itself. In order to use the full range and the updated help files, you need to get them from the Microsoft website. If you try to use Get-Help for a cmdlet for which the help files are not downloaded yet, you get a short help description and then the following notification:

So, you need to run Update-Help to update all the help files. What this command does is that it checks...