PowerShell v2 You Can Omit Get Heres Why

So, I saw this post fly across the Twittersphere earlier today:

Ifiok Moses @mifiok
RT @bradwilson: Just discovered today that in PowerShell, you can leave off "get-". Seriously, try it: type "childitem" or "location". true

Not having heard of this, I tried it out and sure enough, it works. What I wanted to know was how. After pinging Justin about it he reminded me of the great and glorious Trace-Command cmdlet to check it out if I was really curious. Knowing we were looking at a pretty specific command to trigger this in Tracing I tried a few options and hit paydirt with the commandiscovery tracesource. Using this command:

Trace-Command -Name *commanddiscovery* -Expression {acl C: est} -PSHost

I got a good bit of general chattiness indicating it could not find any command in the usual places, i.e., the $env:path folders one by one. This is essentially the same pattern I outlined in this post:

Powershell (v3) - Tab Completion Takes Forever sometimes. Heres why (Be warned: Its long)

Once it looked in all its expected locations and file types it then tried a new trick I hadnt seen yet:

"trying again with get- prepended"

Heres the branch output after that switch:

DEBUG: CommandDiscovery Information: 0 : The command [acl] was not found, trying again with get- prepended
DEBUG: CommandDiscovery Information: 0 : Looking up command: get-acl
DEBUG: CommandDiscovery Information: 0 : Cmdlet found: Get-Acl Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.GetAclCommand,
Microsoft.PowerShell.Security, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35

Right off the bat a cmdlet named Get-Acl is found in the Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands namespace with type GetAclCommand. After the command was located DEBUG output ceased and regular output was returned. Again, Trace-Command was able to identify the underlying mechanics and explain this mystery rather quickly.

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