Determine If A Command Exists In PowerShell

Ed Wilson “The Scripting Guy” posted a great article a while back on how to determine if a command exists here. Here is another approach that I came up with that morning.

function Test-Command {
   param($Command)

   $found = $false
   $match = [Regex]::Match($Command, "(?<Verb>[a-z]{3,11})-(?<Noun>[a-z]{3,})", "IgnoreCase")
   if($match.Success) {
       if(Get-Command -Verb $match.Groups["Verb"] -Noun $match.Groups["Noun"]) {
           $found = $true
       }
   }

   $found
}

Here is a breakdown of the regular expression used.

• The first group in the expression is for the verb, which is 3 to 11 characters long (consult the approved verb list).
• The second group in the expression is for the noun, which can be 3 or more characters long. I limit the acceptable text to only alphabetical characters and by adding the “IgnoreCase” option we can just use “a-z”.

So what would an article be without a quick example.

PS C:\> Test-Command -Command Get-Process True PS C:\> Test-Command -Command Get-Proc* False

Finally, if you would like a shortcut which expects an exact match you can try this:

PS C:\> [bool](Get-Command -Name Get-Process -ea 0) True