Windows things

I don’t really work much with the Windows ecosystem anymore, so tossing my notes all in one page as I go.

PowerShell

cmdlet is what’s native. Try to use these when scripting. It’s a verbose, MSFT-y named equalivalent to gnu utilities. It should do exactly one thing and can be chained together to accomplish something bigger. Some arguments are only available if you use the cmdlet form and not the aliases.

Some aliases are more like the gnu utilities, but not reliably present and can be remapped. Others are abbreviations of the longer cmdlet names using the capital letters - eg, Get-ChildItem is also gci. But not always! Copy-Item is copy or cpi, not ci.

What I wanted	PowerShell cmdlet	PowerShell aliases
list contents	Get-ChildItem	dir gci
where am i?	Get-Location	pwd gl
change directory	Set-Location	cd chdir
make directory	New-Item -ItemType Directory	mkdir
remove directory	Remove-Item -Recurse	rmdir
copy file	Copy-Item	copy cp cpi
move file	Move-Item	move mi mv
remove file	Remove-Item	del
get file contents	Get-Content	type gc
write to file	Set-Content	write echo
redirect output to file	Out-File	> or >>
who am i?	whoami	whoami
what’s running?	Get-Process	ps (not same output)

Other handy cmdlets:

• Get-ComputerInfo gets a bunch of system info
• Get-Host gets some info about the PowerShell host
• Get-Service gets info about services (remember services aren’t the same in Windows)
• Get-Environment gets environment variables
• GetFileInfo gets some info about a file like owner, dates, etc.