Linux commands that work in Powershell by default.

#powershell #linux #windows

Some people may not realize there are a lot of Linux commands that work within PowerShell. I thought I would list some of them for people to try. In the future I will do a write up on each one individually. For now, let's just get familiar with them.

cat - Lists contents of files to the terminal window.
cd - Change directory
clear - Clear the terminal window.
cp - Copy file
curl - Retrieves information and files from URLs or internet addresses.
date - Shows current date
diff - Compares two text files and shows differences between them.
echo - Prints a string of text in the terminal window.
exit - Exit your current shell.
finger - Shows information on user.
find - Search for files.
history - Brief list of the last few commands you have used.
kill - Kill a running process.
ls - List the files and folders in the current directory.
man - Show man pages.
mkdir - Create a directory
mv - Move a file or directory.
ping - Tool to help verify network connectivity.
ps - List running processes.
pwd - Prints current working directory to the terminal.
rm - Remove a file.
rmdir - Remove a directory.
ssh - Connect to a remote computer.
tar - Create archives.
wget - Downloads files served with HTTP, HTTPS, or FTP over a network.
whoami - Find out who you are logged in as.

Please play around with these in your terminal. Let me know if there are any I may have missed and I can add them.

Top comments (14)

Bryan Rodriguez • May 23 '20

It’s a great resource. Recommend that you change the commands with markdown code using the back ticks. Also, believe if you run Get-Alias * , you should get a list of all these Linux native commands that have been used to represent a PowerShell command.

Andrea Giammarchi • May 23 '20

what about operators such as | (pipe) > (create from scratch) or >> (append to file or create)?

also, if sed or grep or awk would work in there too, I might update some of my bash scripts to work in PowerShell too. Thanks.

P.S. it'd be cool if ${1} and other variables are reachable as well, having just commands but no way to cross send parameters via shell is 1/3rd as useful.

Carl Walsh • May 23 '20

These aliases trip me up. If I type rm -r -f * I get an error about ambiguous arguments between -force or -filter, and I need to change the flag to rm -r -fo *.

I also lost half an hour figuring out why curl was respecting the system default proxy in one terminal window but not the other. After that I turned off a bunch of aliases.

Bryan Rodriguez • May 23 '20

Did you try rm -rf <file or dir>? That’s what I usually use if I’m in PowerShell.

Carl Walsh • Jun 5 '20

I tried it; I get Remove-Item : A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter name 'rf'. The Remove-Item cmdlet doesn't have a param starting with rf... Is your rm not aliased to Remove-Item?

Nathan Strutz • Sep 4 '20

I was surprised to learn I could create a file via touch. It's not quite as cool as PowerShell's New-Item but it totally worked. Touch didn't make the list here but it got me thinking and that's how I found this post. Thanks for writing it!