Help or Man equivalent in PowerShell


man, help or a ? are the most common options you may find on Windows, macOS, or Linux environments to find help or a manual about various tools or commands for an application. If you are using PowerShell and wondering what is the equivalent of this command, well its a cmdlet named Get-Help.

As you may have already guessed, every command in PowerShell starts with a verb like GET- or a SET-, so is for the help command.

Let us see a few examples:

PS /Users/c2ctech> GET-Help Get-Date

NAME
    Get-Date

SYNTAX
    Get-Date [[-Date] <datetime>] [-Year <int>] [-Month <int>] [-Day <int>] [-Hour <int>] [-Minute <int>] [-Second <int>] 
    [-Millisecond <int>] [-DisplayHint {Date | Time | DateTime}] [-Format <string>] [-AsUTC] [<CommonParameters>]
...
Get-Help Command for Help for PowerShell on Mac

Note: You may see the below remark when you try to get help (especially if using pwsh on Linux or macOS).

REMARKS Get-Help cannot find the Help files for this cmdlet on this computer. It is displaying only partial help.
-- To download and install Help files for the module that includes this cmdlet, use Update-Help.
-- To view the Help topic for this cmdlet online, type: "Get-Help Invoke-History -Online" or
go to https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=2096586.

One best way to get more details is to make use of the -Online flag.

PS> Get-Help Get-Date -Online

This will open up your default web browser and display the online help page for the command.

PowerShell Online Help Page using Command on Mac

Facing issues? Have Questions? Post them here! I am happy to answer!

Author Info:

Rakesh (He/Him) has over 14+ years of experience in Web and Application development. He is the author of insightful How-To articles for Code2care.

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