Linux commands that work in Powershell by default.

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.

Comments

[Bryan Rodriguez]

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]

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]

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]

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

[Carl Walsh]

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]

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!

[Paul Ngumii]

Excellent! thank you for listing these, just started using the new Windows terminal and I have much love for it

[Mohan Sharma]

What about netstat? That also works in linux and windows.

[Caedmon Craig]

I generally use ifconfig...

[Bas]

Really useful, not: finger.

[Tim Apple]

finger works for me? weird. Here is the doc for using it from MS.

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-s...

[Bas]

Who runs a fingerd nowadays?

[Tim Apple]

To be honest, I have no clue. But it it worked as I ran through all the commands I could think of.

[Danar]

some of them work in cmd also like ping, cd, ssh and mkdir.