All of the about_* topics are missing from my PowerShell help. What gives?

I've not used PowerShell often on this machine — it was updated from windows 7 pro to windows 10 a few months ago. $PSVersionTable shows I'm on version 5.

I've run update-help as administrator, but all of the about_ help topics are missing, EXCEPT for about_CimSession for some reason. That is, when I run Get-Help * | Where-Object { $_.Name -Like "about_*" }, I get about_CimSession as the only result. Any attempts to get other about_ topics result in a search list or a related topic.

How can I fix this?

NReilingh

Posted 2016-08-24T21:35:55.350

Reputation: 5 539

Older powershell versions seemed to install WITH help files, the newer versions seem to NOT include those files. They only come down after you've invoked update-help. If you're behind a proxy, make sure it is assigned, otherwise update-help will fail. – Clayton – 2016-08-30T13:30:32.730

@Craig620 I've been running update-help -force till the cows come home, but it's not getting me any new about_ topics. It's like PS5 doesn't know they are supposed to exist. – NReilingh – 2016-08-30T14:57:17.493

Answers

Run Update-Help -Force as local administrator as you have done already to make sure that the help files are present in C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\en-US or your locale.

Then verify that the file extensions for the about_ help files are actually .help.txt and not just .txt PowerShell help files need to be .help.txt.

There is an issue somewhere in the Update-Help process in PowerShell v5 where the files are being named .txt.

The following one-liner will Move-Item (not Rename-Item more on that below) all the .txt into .help.txt. This path will include Module help files also in the usual PowerShell system directory — make sure to check if your PowerShell is installed somewhere else.

Get-ChildItem -Path 'C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0' -Recurse -Include '*.txt' -Exclude '*.help.txt' | Move-Item -Destination { $_.DirectoryName + '\' + $_.Name -replace '.txt$','.help.txt' } -Force

After renaming the .txt to .help.txt your Get-Help about* will work again.

However, if you run Update-Help -Force a new set of incorrect .txt will be downloaded again. Hence the reason for the script above using Move-Item (instead of Rename-Item) as you can run it again for cleanup multiple times.

This issue needs to be sorted out by Microsoft.

Weaver

Posted 2016-08-24T21:35:55.350

Reputation: 156

This is amazing, and was a contributing factor to the issue I was experiencing, so, points! Turns out there were also a couple of modules with the same file name issue. Additionally, some helpfiles were just flat out missing, and there now exists a solution for that: https://github.com/kilasuit/Install-AboutHelp

– NReilingh – 2016-10-31T19:48:39.523

Oh oops. The one-liner you provided moves all of those files to C:\ Working on a fix... – NReilingh – 2016-11-01T01:30:23.617

One more thing. The latest set of help files that get downloaded with the wrong extension appear to have terrible formatting compared with their 2014-era counterparts—check out about_Execution_Policies if you can. What a mess! – NReilingh – 2016-11-01T01:56:15.847

Odd that for you the files weren't being moved correctly. Good updates to the answer/post. Thank you. Ridiculous that Microsoft hasn't fixed yet as of November 2016. – Weaver – 2016-11-04T14:20:26.700

-2

I had the same problem with not being able to get-help with any about_ topics on my Win10 machine. All the help files were there with the .help.txt extensions. I also had VMware PowerCLI installed. I renamed the Modules folder for PowerCLI at C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\vSphere PowerCLI\Modules and everything worked okay. I ended up uninstalling PowerCLI.

Paul M.

Posted 2016-08-24T21:35:55.350

Reputation: 1