Powershell 2: How to eliminate duplicate help entries

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I am frequently making calls such as:

get-help <some-command>

in Powershell 2. For many, but not all, of these commands, I am not shown the contents of the help entry. Instead, I get duplicates, and only the help object itself is displayed:

[PS2]> get-help remove-distributiongroup | more

Name                              Category  Synopsis
----                              --------  --------
Remove-DistributionGroup          Cmdlet    Use the Remove-DistributionGroup...
Remove-DistributionGroup          Cmdlet    Use the Remove-DistributionGroup...

Being a complete PS novice, I hack around this by doing something similar to the following:

[PS2]> $var = get-help remove-distributiongroup
[PS2]> $var[0] | get-member
... Output ...
[PS2]> $var[0].Parameters |more
... Part of the documentation ...
[PS2]> $var[0].Synopsis |more
... Another part of the documentation ...

Couple of questions.

  • Will my Windows admin co-workers know how to remove the duplicate entries? I'm just a Unix guy.
  • If not, is there an easier method to get what I need instead of the convoluted hack I came up with above?

Thanks!

[UPDATE[:

Tried pk's suggestion, but sadly that didn't work. Here's the output when piped through select -unique:

Name                              Category  Synopsis
----                              --------  --------
Get-DistributionGroup             Cmdlet    Use the Get-DistributionGroup cm...

Best Answer

This is probably caused by duplicate PS Snapins loaded. If you are in the Exchange Management Shell and then load the Exchange 2010 management snapin (maybe in a script?), you will see these duplicate get-help responses. While running the EMS run get-pssnapin and check for the E2010 snapin. If it's there, use remove-pssnapin to unload it.

See "Get-Help Produces Duplicate Topics" for more info.

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