What exactly is “exit” in PowerShell?

Question

You can exit PowerShell by typing exit. So far so good. But what exactly is this?

PS Home:\\> gcm exit
Get-Command : The term \'exit\' is not         


        

Answer 1

It's a reserved keyword (like return, filter, function, break).

Reference

Also, as per Section 7.6.4 of Bruce Payette's Powershell in Action:

But what happens when you want a script to exit from within a function defined in that script? ... To make this easier, Powershell has the exit keyword.

Of course, as other have pointed out, it's not hard to do what you want by wrapping exit in a function:

PS C:\> function ex{exit}
PS C:\> new-alias ^D ex