Exploring the PowerShell Cmdlet: Get-PSSession

Welcome back to Wahmans Powershell blog! Today, we’re diving into a very useful cmdlet in the remote management world of PowerShell: Get-PSSession.

According to Microsoft’s documentation, the Get-PSSession cmdlet “gets the PowerShell sessions on local and remote computers.” This means with this cmdlet you can enumerate existing session objects, whether they’re active, idle, or disconnected. This is especially useful in remote management, where you need to manage established sessions to remote hosts.

What Is a PowerShell Session?

A session, also known as a PSSession, is created when using cmdlets like New-PSSession or Enter-PSSession. These are essentially persistent PowerShell instances that allow you to run commands remotely across networked systems and retain context (like environment variables or imported modules) throughout the session.

Basic Usage

The Get-PSSession cmdlet helps you list out these sessions so that you can reuse, remove, or manage them effectively.

Example 1: List All Current Sessions (Beginner)

Get-PSSession

This simple command lists all PSSessions available in your current PowerShell session. If nothing is returned, you probably don’t have any active sessions.

Example 2: Creating + Listing Remote Session (Intermediate)

Let’s create a session to a remote machine and then retrieve it.

$session = New-PSSession -ComputerName "Server01"
Get-PSSession

This command first creates a new remote session and then lists all available sessions, including your newly created one. Here you’ll see a session ID, computer name, and state (like Opened or Disconnected).

Example 3: Filter Sessions on a Specific Computer (Intermediate)

Get-PSSession | Where-Object { $_.ComputerName -eq "Server01" }

Use this if you’ve got multiple sessions across different servers, and want to only see sessions related to a specific one.

Example 4: Remove Disconnected Sessions (Advanced)

Imagine you have multiple stale sessions lying around. Clean them up with this approach:

Get-PSSession | Where-Object { $_.State -eq 'Broken' -or $_.State -eq 'Disconnected' } | Remove-PSSession

This command filters out sessions that are no longer in an active state and removes them to clean up your session pool.

Conclusion

The Get-PSSession cmdlet is fundamental when working with PowerShell Remoting. It gives you visibility into your established remoting context and allows for powerful session management techniques that scale from single workstations to full enterprise infrastructure.

Happy scripting, and I will see you in the next post!