Book excerpt: For years, support for scripting and command-line administration on the Windows platform has paled in comparison to the support offered by the Unix platform. Unix administrators enjoyed the immense power and productivity of their command shells, while Windows administrators watched in envy. Windows PowerShell, Microsoft's next-generation command shell and scripting language, changes this landscape completely. This Short Cut contains the essential reference material to help you get your work done-including the scripting language syntax, a regular-expression reference, useful .NET classes, and much more.