PowerShell for Linux admins

During the Cloud Expo convention in the Netherlands last month, I spoke to someone who said that learning all the PowerShell commands as a Linux admin was difficult. PowerShell was built to make it easier for Linux admins to transition to it. In this blog post, I will show you how aliases work and how they help Linux Admins get started with basic PowerShell tasks…

Aliases

From the start, PowerShell would let you use aliases for specific commands. There are many built-in ones, and you can add your own if you want to. To get a list of aliases, you can use the Get-Alias cmdlet, which will return the list of the currently configured aliases:

As shown above, the list will also show if a particular alias was added by installing a specific module. Az.Accounts, for example, add these:

Linux aliases

As you can see in the first screenshot, specific aliases that are available by default in Powershell are used in Linux. From the available aliases, these are similar to Linux commands:

Linux command	PowerShell cmdlet	Description
cat	Get-Content	Show the contents of a file
cd	Set-Location	Change directory
clear	Clear-Host	Clear contents of the terminal screen
cp	Copy-Item	Copy a file to another file
dir	Get-ChildItem	Show the files and folders in current folder
echo	Write-Output	Output text to screen
history	Get-History	Retrieve the list of previously uses commands
kill	Stop-Process	Terminate a process
ls	Get-ChildItem	Show the files and folders in the current folder
man	help	Get help for a specific command
md	mkdir / New-Item	Create a folder, mkdir
mount	New-PSDrive	Mount a temporary or persistent drive or folder
mv	Move-Item	Move a file or folder to another location or rename it
popd	Pop-Location	Change current working directory
ps	Get-Process	Retrieve running processes
pushd	Push-Location	Save the current directory and move to another
pwd	Get-Location	Show current location
rm	Remove-Item	Remove file
rmdir	Remove-Item	Remove directory
sleep	Start-Sleep	Sleep for x seconds
sort	Sort-Object	Sort output
tee	Tee-Object	Write output to file from pipe

It could be that I missed one, but these are the ones I know and also use in Linux myself 🙂

Best practices in using aliases

While aliases are excellent, typing fewer characters, you should always use the full PowerShell cmdlet in scripts, making it more readable. I wrote a blog post in the past with examples here.