Powershell Basics for Bash User

As someone coming from linux, there is one thing that I miss when trying to daily driving windows, and that is the terminal. Windows has great terminal emulator nowadays, with powershell being windows’ most powerful shell.

You see, it’s really natural for me to spend most of my time in the terminal when I’m using linux, it’s just much more simple and more focused. Not only that, the commands in linux are really short consisting of 2-6 letters on average, and once you know your way, you can combine any of that commands to make everything even more concise and quick.

That being said, here we will take a look on how to navigate windows file system and do simple actions in windows using powershell.

pwd

A lot of powershell commands that has been aliased to that of the bash counterpart, however pwd is not one of them. We need to use Get-Location to print current working directory.

> Get-Location

Path
----
C:\Users\deni

ls

Powershell counterpart Get-ChildItem. Alias ls, dir, gci.

> ls

    Directory: C:\Users\deni


Mode                 LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                 -------------         ------ ----
d-r---         9/13/2025     22:28                Desktop
d-r---         9/16/2025     11:07                Documents
d-r---         9/15/2025     19:18                Downloads
d-r---         8/23/2025     12:25                Favorites
d-----          9/5/2025     16:39                Games
d-r---         8/23/2025     12:25                Links

cd

Powershell counterpart Set-Location. Alias cd, sl.

> cd $HOME

cp

Powershell counterpart Copy-Item. Alias cp, copy.

> cp file1.txt file2.txt

mv

Powershell counterpart Move-Item. Alias mv, move.

> mv oldname.txt newname.txt

rm

Powershell counterpart Remove-Item. Alias rm, del, erase.

> rm file.txt

cat

Powershell counterpart Get-Content. Alias cat, gc, type.

> cat file.txt

echo

Powershell counterpart Write-Output. Alias echo.

> echo "hi"

grep

Powershell counterpart Select-String.

> Select-String "word" file.txt

which

Powershell counterpart Get-Command. Alias gcm.

> gcm git

man

Powershell counterpart Get-Help.

> Get-Help Get-Location

whoami

Powershell counterpart whoami.

> whoami

printenv

> Get-ChildItem Env:

export VAR=value

$env:VAR="value"

ps

> Get-Process

kill

> Stop-Process -Id <PID>

history

> Get-History

ifconfig

> Get-NetIPAddress

curl

> Invoke-WebRequest <URL>

df

> Get-PSDrive

stat

> Get-Item file

You can also view the list of aliases possible in powershell by using command alias.