Starting and Stopping a service with the use of the right cmdlets

We have already talked about the get-service cmdlet in the previous post. Now let’s talked about two other similar cmdlets.

First, lets use the cmdlet get-service to check our services.

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We can manipulate these services with the right cmdlets.

We use the DisplayName property to isolate the service we are interested with. Let’s say this service is the fontcache service.

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We see that this service is running!

Stopping a service

What about stopping it?

Could we achieve that with a cmdlet?

Yes! There is the stop-service cmdlet, that is suitable for this job.

Let’s see if we can stop it.

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We notice that we still need to use the get-service cmdlet in order to check the status of the service.

Get-service does exactly that, display a service to powershell, while stop-service is stopping it behind the scenes without displaying it.

NOTE: In order to save typing you can use the Tab + arrowUp/arrowDown shortcut that enables us to get past cmdlets showing.

There is cmdlet for that.

It’s easy to guess. We just type start-service and we are good.

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Here we also need the get-service cmdlet in order to display what’s going on.

The start-service cmdlet can only start the service, not display it.

This is consistent with the basic principle of all Cmdlets. Do one specific thing only.

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