Get-Help should have an option to force full-text search

[brasswood]

Summary of the new feature / enhancement

I was trying to use the built-in help system to learn how to search for text in output, like grep on Unix. So, I tried this command:

Get-Help *find*

Name                              Category  Module                    Synopsis
----                              --------  ------                    --------
Find-PSResource                   Cmdlet    Microsoft.PowerShell.PSR… Find-PSResource…
Find-PackageProvider              Cmdlet    PackageManagement         Find-PackageProvider…
Find-Package                      Cmdlet    PackageManagement         Find-Package…
Find-Script                       Function  PowerShellGet             …
Find-Command                      Function  PowerShellGet             …
Find-RoleCapability               Function  PowerShellGet             …
Find-Module                       Function  PowerShellGet             …
Find-DSCResource                  Function  PowerShellGet             …
Find-LapsADExtendedRights         Cmdlet    LAPS                      Find-LapsADExtendedRights…
Find-NetIPsecRule                 Function  NetSecurity               …
Find-NetRoute                     Function  NetTCPIP                  …

As you can see, this brought up several commands that had "find" in their name, but none of them were what I needed. I asked ChatGPT and it said "Select-String." I looked at the help page for Select-String:

Get-Help Select-String

NAME
    Select-String

SYNOPSIS
    Finds text in strings and files.
...

Hmm...

Get-Help "finds text"

Name                              Category  Module                    Synopsis
----                              --------  ------                    --------
Select-String                     Cmdlet    Microsoft.PowerShell.Uti… Finds text in strings and files.
Select-Xml                        Cmdlet    Microsoft.PowerShell.Uti… Finds text in an XML string or document.

There it is!

When you are using the help system to try to find a command, you don't know what that command is called. In my case, I thought it might contain "find" in the name or description. Had Get-Help done a full-text search, I would have found the command I needed with this query. Instead, the command was hidden from me because a bunch of commands I didn't need had "find" in the name. As someone new to PowerShell, I could not easily guess what a good query string would be to avoid this situation, because I know nothing about the commands! That's why I'm using Get-Help in the first place!

The moral of this story is that there should be a way to force Get-Help to do a full-text search regardless of whether the pattern matches any command names. However, from reading the help page for Get-Help, it looks like the only way to get it to do a full-text search is to give it a search term that doesn't match the name of any command.

Proposed technical implementation details (optional)

No response

[hudsonm62]

Whilst I do agree with you, take a look at the Approved Verbs (or via get-verb | select Verb,Description), every official command uses these and follows these guidelines.

Couple this with wildcards in Get-Help:

PS> get-help Find-*Package* | select name

Name
----
Find-WinGetPackage
Find-PackageProvider
Find-Package
Find-NugetPackage

Another option is to use the command reference on MS Learn, but I imagine the results are the same or similar as doing Get-Help *searchterm*

[theJasonHelmick]

Thank you @brasswood for this feature request. While we see the value in this feature, due to the complexity of the help system this is not something we are able to pursue at this time. For now, we will improve the documentation.