The main reason I began writing my PowerShell extensions was that I needed to do some in-depth traversal of the SharePoint farm and its content. I’m going to demonstrate some of those extensions now, using Getting an SPWeb The conventional way of obtaining a reference to an SPWeb is: get-spweb http://mybiglongservername:8080/path/to/web Because this requires a fully-qualified URL, [...]
I've been using PowerShell since it came out, and along the way I cobbled together a bunch of cmdlets, functions, and filters to create a fairly robust PowerShell toolkit.