Hello!
Microsoft’s Azure keeps growing. Azure isn’t all Windows, but Windows is a great reason to use Azure and a lot of Windows workloads get run there. In today’s Windows, PowerShell is the engineer’s interface to the OS and is often the language behind automation. I decided I needed to know PowerShell to keep up with the industry.
You can run PowerShell on OSX! There are a few differences (e.g. it’s still running inside of the Terminal app so things like ctrl+u work, but in native PowerShell on Windows they don’t), but the basic system is the same. I’ve been running it day to day so I can get used to it.
In bash, there are a bunch of commands I use when I’m trying to figure things out. Like searching the shell aliases or the man pages database. I found plenty of great guides on the basics of PowerShell, but it took some fiddling to find all the parallel pwsh commands for my “figuring things out” commands. I also found a couple handy commands that don’t exist directly in bash (that I know of). Here’s a table:
Update 2019-11: The Out-String uses here are anti-patterns. See my newer post on why. I’ve updated this table with the better way.
| Bash | PowerShell |
|---|---|
man cd |
Get-Help cd |
man -k 'search string' |
Get-Help 'search string' |
alias |
Get-Alias |
| Not available. Searches for aliases of a specific cmdlet (‘out-host’ in this example). |
Get-Alias -Definition 'out-host' |
alias | grep move |
Bad:
Get-Alias | Out-String -stream | Select-String -Pattern 'move' Good: Get-Alias | Where-Object Name -Match ".*move.*" |
env |
Get-ChildItem env: |
env | grep PATH |
Bad:
Get-ChildItem env: | Out-String -stream | sls -Pattern 'PATH' Good: Get-ChildItem env: | Where-Object Name -Match ".*PATH.*" |
| Not available. Wildcard-matches environment variable names but not values (‘PATH’ in this example). |
Get-ChildItem env:*PATH* |
One other tip is that PowerShell has great tab-completion for commands. It also follows a consistent Verb-Noun convention, so you can try to guess the verb and tab-complete your way to the command. Like if you wanted to know the time, try “get” and hit tab twice and you’ll get a list that has “Get-Date” in it.
Hope that saves you some time!
Adam
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