Verbs and nouns are basic parts of any language, and they’re pretty fundamental to how PowerShell is structured.
PowerShell Commands are generally named in verb-noun pairs.
For example, we list all of the loaded commands in PowerShell with:
Get-Command
PowerShell has a list of standard verbs. We can find that list with the command:
Get-Verb
(hopefully, you could see that one coming).
By having a standard set of verbs, the whole universe of PowerShell is more likely to be discoverable and understandable.
For instance, we can use Get-Command to see all that we can Get:
Get-Command -Verb Get
Or to see all that we can Set:
Get-Command -Verb Set
If you’re writing commands in PowerShell, you should give them a standard verb, and you should use similar nouns to refer to similar things.
For instance, we can get processes with:
Get-Process
And we can find all commands with the Process noun to see what we could do to a process.
Get-Command -Noun Process
This verb-noun convention helps keep PowerShell a great high level language.