Intro to PowerShell Lab File System Navigation, Directory Management, and Setup

Learning objective: By the end of this exercise, students will be able to navigate the file system and manage directories using basic PowerShell commands.

Commands to learn

PowerShell provides a set of intuitive commands for navigating and managing the file system. Let’s explore some essential commands that will help you move around and organize your directories with ease. PowerShell commands are referred to as cmdlets, although the terms are often used interchangeably - they’re the building blocks of PowerShell scripts.

• Get-Location: Displays the current working directory.
• Set-Location: Changes the current working directory to the specified directory.
• New-Item -ItemType Directory: Creates a new directory with the specified name.
• Remove-Item: Deletes the specified directory or file.
• Rename-Item: Renames the specified directory or file.

Notice how these commands follow a consistent pattern: Verb-Noun. The Verb describes the action you want to perform, and the Noun specifies the target of that action.

💡 As you complete this lab you may need to look up commands on the internet to get more information about them.

Setup

Follow the steps below to set up your PowerShell environment and prepare for the lab exercise.

1. Launch your Terminal application.
   • If you’re using Windows, this will be the Powershell terminal.
   • If you’re using a Mac, you’ll want to ensure Powershell is installed on your terminal. You can do this by running brew install --cask powershell in your terminal

2. Open a PowerShell console using the pwsh command.

3. Use Get-Location to display your current working directory.

4. Use Set-Location to navigate to a different directory. Navigate to the ~/code/ga/labs directory by providing it as an argument.

5. Use Get-Location to verify that you are in the correct directory.

6. After verifying you’re in the correct location, use New-Item -ItemType Directory to create a new directory. Name the directory ps-lab by providing that name as an argument to the command as shown below:

   New-Item -ItemType Directory "ps-lab"
   

7. Use Rename-Item to rename the ps-lab directory to intro-to-powershell-lab by providing the current path to the item as the first argument and the new name for that item as the second argument.

   🧠 More complex commands, such as Rename-Item have parameters that may either be required or can help label positional items in a command. For example the above command to rename an item could be written as:

   Rename-Item "./ps-lab" "intro-to-powershell-lab"
   

   or as:

   Rename-Item -Path "./ps-lab" -NewName "intro-to-powershell-lab"
   

8. Use Set-Location to move into the intro-to-powershell-lab directory.

Git and GitHub setup

Git commands work like they do in Bash, so you can use the same commands you’re familiar with to work with Git in PowerShell.

1. Initialize a new Git repository with these commands:

   git init
   git add .
   git commit -m "initial commit"
   

2. Create a new repository on GitHub named intro-to-powershell-lab.

3. Link your local repo to the remote GitHub repo:

   git remote add origin https://github.com/<github-username>/intro-to-powershell-lab.git
   git push origin main
   

   🚨 Do not copy the above command. It will not work. Your GitHub username will replace <github-username> (including the < and >) in the URL above.

4. When the time comes, don’t forget to push your final code to GitHub!