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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?

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  • 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
    Aug 30, 2016 at 13:30
  • @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
    Aug 30, 2016 at 14:57

3 Answers 3

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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.

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  • 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: github.com/kilasuit/Install-AboutHelp
    – NReilingh
    Oct 31, 2016 at 19:48
  • Oh oops. The one-liner you provided moves all of those files to C:\ Working on a fix...
    – NReilingh
    Nov 1, 2016 at 1:30
  • 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
    Nov 1, 2016 at 1:56
  • 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
    Nov 4, 2016 at 14:20
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It was stupid locale for me. Get-UICulture returns en-GB, but apparently help is only available in en-US, because of course it is.

Update-Help -Force -UICulture en-US -Verbose

Works fine on 7.2.4 on Ubuntu ARMx64.

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    – Community Bot
    Jul 16, 2022 at 21:37
  • It solves the issue of missing about_* help files on Win 8.1 with non-US UICulture. Works for both 5.1 and 7.2.
    – csadam
    Aug 28, 2022 at 23:06
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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.

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