7

Version 5.0 was released in February 2016 as part of Windows Management

Framework 5.0 for Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Win-
dows 8.1 and Windows 7 SP 1. (Microsoft 2016a) Windows PowerShell 5.0 is
installed by default on Windows Server 2016. The 5.0 release included class def-
initions, debugging features and DSC v2.0. (Microsoft 2017d.)

Version 6 was a major point in PowerShell’s development. PowerShell was open

sourced and renamed to PowerShell Core (previously Windows PowerShell).
PowerShell Core utilizes .NET Core, the open sourced version of .NET, which
allows it to support a wider range of operating systems. (Snover 2016). Operating
systems supported by PowerShell Core 6.0 are listed in table 1.

Operating systems Versions

Windows 7, 8.1, 10
Windows Server 2008 R2, 2012 R2, 2016
Ubuntu 14.04, 16.04, 17.04
Debian 8.7+, 9
CentOS 7
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7
OpenSUSE 42.2
Fedora 25, 26
macOS 10.12+

Table 1: PowerShell Core 6.0 officially supported operating systems. (Microsoft

2018a).

Many of the new features in PowerShell Core 6 relate to its widened operating
system support, including SSH support for remoting and renaming pow-
ershell.exe to pwsh.exe to support parallel installations of Windows PowerShell
and PowerShell Core. Many minor changes were made to better support the
shell-related conventions in Linux and macOS systems. (Microsoft 2018a).

At time of writing, PowerShell’s latest version is 6.0.1. In this thesis, the shell is
simply referred to as PowerShell. All cmdlets and features presented in this thesis