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Linux commands that work in Powershell by default.

Tim Apple on May 22, 2020

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. I...

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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!