PowerShell tip - skip "Get"

In PowerShell you can skip the verb “Get” (at least for most cmdlets – it isn't working for things like Get-Process).

Interesting thing which I discovered today (BTW, SysAdmin day).

Instead of using

Get-Mailbox yourname@domain.com

you can just use

Mailbox yourname@domain.com

It looks like it’s not an alias as Get-Alias cmdlet doesn’t show anything for these noun-only cmdlets.

~~Unfortunately it has one significant drawback: Tab completion/Intellisense in ISE will not be working with such cmdlets which makes them quite useless. But for ad-hoc checking can be helpful.~~

Update 2018-12-06:

After digging a bit more I found far more information about that default verb feature. First of all, I check if that is something built into some modules so I tried cmdlets from multiple modules:

service
aduser mySan
ExcelColumnName # random cmdlet from ImportExcel module

The only cmdlet I cannot run is

process

But it's due to conflict with begin process end.

I also discovered that tab completion apparently works (in contrary to what I wrote in that post previously) but only for parameters, not for cmdlets.

How I investigated?

As stated in About Command Precedence:

If you do not specify a path, PowerShell uses the following precedence order when it runs commands:

1. Alias
2. Function
3. Cmdlet
4. Native Windows commands

Checking one by one (based on Get-Service):

# Checking for alias
PS C:\> Get-Alias service
Get-Alias : This command cannot find a matching alias because an alias
with the name 'service' does not exist.

# Checking for function
PS C:\> Get-Command -Name service -CommandType Function
Get-Command : The term 'service' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet,
function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name,
or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.

# Checking for cmdlet
PS C:\> Get-Command -Name service -CommandType Cmdlet
Get-Command : The term 'service' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, 
function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name,
or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.

Next in cmd (for native Windows commands):

C:\>service
'service' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

What next?

What gave me the answer was searching in Stack Overflow. First interesting thing I found was this answer:

If the command name does not contain a dash or a slash, and no command has been found after exhausting the last option in the list above, it'll try again, but with Get- prepended.

And below, there's an explanation why Get-Command doesn't follow that logic.