It wasn’t but a few days ago that I saw something that piqued my interest. It was an example of running a command against PowerShell Core (pwsh.exe) from Windows PowerShell (powershell.exe), or maybe it was the other way around? Whichever, I’ve included an image that shows this working in both directions. That’s to say it’s an example of running the same command in both versions of PowerShell, from each version of PowerShell.

I do suspect the picture will help explain things, if that last paragraph didn’t.

In the above image, we can see that we’ve run a command against both Windows PowerShell (5.1) and PowerShell Core (6.1). In both consoles, we’ve run the same command; it’s included below. Its goal was to return the version of PowerShell, for both versions of PowerShell.

'powershell.exe','pwsh.exe' | ForEach-Object {
    & $_ -Command {$PSVersionTable.PSVersion}
}

Our results are identical; we knew, we were running 5.1 and 6.1. Neat, right!? Keep this trick in your back pocket, as I do suspect it may be helpful for one of us, one day. Maybe it won’t have anything to do with obtaining the version, of a version of PowerShell, and instead someone will find another use.

Here’s a start. The thought I had was, can I run an Active Directory command in Windows PowerShell (powershell.exe) from PowerShell Core (pwsh.exe)? You bet I can.

In the below example, I’ve returned my GivenName from Active Directory using Windows PowerShell, from PowerShell Core. That could be potentially helpful for someone in some yet-to-be-thought-of project.

Especially in the case of Active Directory, it’s important to remember that each time a command is run, it must import the Active Directory module. Consider that each command is spinning up a new powershell.exe process. For all we know, this may be the reason why the WindowsCompatibility module uses PowerShell sessions, and not PowerShell processes.

In this next example, we issue a Windows PowerShell only command that’s tied to a builtin Microsoft Windows PowerShell model. We issue the Get-LocalUser cmdlet out of the Microsoft.PowerShell.LocalAccounts module. While it’s still importing a module into a powershell.exe process, it loads quicker than the ActiveDirectory PowerShell module did.

I’m going to need to call this a night here soon, but I keep finding more things to try. Like this example. There’s two commands. The first one runs Windows PowerShell, which runs PowerShell Core to determine the version of PowerShell Core.

The second one runs Windows PowerShell, which runs PowerShell Core, which runs Windows PowerShell to determine the version of Windows PowerShell. The image for these examples might be easier to understand, too.

Alright, that’s it for now. Perhaps I’ll come up with some other ideas to try another day. I need to put this post, and me, to bed.