Most of the time PowerShell is pretty clear about what it is doing. The language attempts to be concise but not cryptic. For example, PowerShell commands follow a consistent Verb-Noun naming convention. Parameter names are in plain English and meaningful. I've certainly worked with my share of cryptic languages. Perl anyone? However, that doesn't mean PowerShell isn't without confusion. It can be challenging to keep track of symbols and characters and what they are supposed to do. This is especially true for PowerShell beginners or those coming from other languages where certain characters have different meanings. I thought it would be helpful to write an article or two about special characters in PowerShell. These are typically punctuation marks that have a specific meaning or use-case in PowerShell. And even then, usage will vary based on the situation. Fortunately, PowerShell is very good at figuring out the context of your command. However, you might need a little assistance to make sure PowerShell will use the character the way you expect. Let's start our exploration of PowerShell characters with the question mark (`?`) and see what we learn along the way. ## Alias Option The first place you'll see `?` used is as a PowerShell alias.

PS C:\> gps | ? ws -gt 300mb 

Handles  NPM(K)    PM(K)      WS(K)     CPU(s)     Id  SI ProcessName           

-------  ------    -----      -----     ------     --  -- -----------           

   1991     135   295680     329588     170.27  17104   1 firefox               

    848      54   349760     313988      14.63  18960   1 firefox               

    333      63   303696     311308      27.75  27896   1 firefox               

   3934     289   361772     316200     134.41  23128   1 Grammarly.Desktop     

      0       0     3244     689172      24.77   4596   0 Memory Compression    

   2422      95   384656     424268      10.95  23296   1 powershell_ise        

   1251     175   249252     382596      11.03  16704   1 pwsh                  

   1553     110   395996     373392      46.47   5488   1 Snagit32

Get-Process | Where-Object ws -gt 300mb

Most of the time PowerShell is pretty clear about what it is doing. The language attempts to be concise but not cryptic. For example, PowerShell commands follow a consistent Verb-Noun naming convention. Parameter names are in plain English and meaningful. I've certainly worked with my share of cryptic languages. Perl anyone?

However, that doesn't mean PowerShell isn't without confusion. It can be challenging to keep track of symbols and characters and what they are supposed to do. This is especially true for PowerShell beginners or those coming from other languages where certain characters have different meanings.

I thought it would be helpful to write an article or two about special characters in PowerShell. These are typically punctuation marks that have a specific meaning or use-case in PowerShell. And even then, usage will vary based on the situation. Fortunately, PowerShell is very good at figuring out the context of your command. However, you might need a little assistance to make sure PowerShell will use the character the way you expect.