PowerShell vs Bash

PowerShell · Reference cheat sheet

📋 Overview

Bash pipelines text; PowerShell pipelines objects. Bash is ubiquitous on Unix; PowerShell is cross-platform (pwsh) with deep .NET integration. Choose based on environment and data shape—many teams use both.

🔧 Core concepts

Interop: call bash from pwsh and vice versa when tools are installed.

💡 Examples

Same task:

# bash
ls -1 *.log | wc -l
cat file.json | jq '.name'

# PowerShell
@(Get-ChildItem *.log).Count
(Get-Content -Raw file.json | ConvertFrom-Json).name

Call the other shell:

bash -lc 'grep -R TODO .'

pwsh -NoProfile -Command 'Get-ChildItem | Select-Object Name'

Environment vars:

export PORT=8080

$env:PORT = '8080'

⚠️ Pitfalls

• Assuming curl means the same thing (alias vs binary) across shells.
• Quoting rules differ—don’t paste bash snippets into PowerShell unchanged.
• Exit codes: bash set -e vs PowerShell $ErrorActionPreference.
• Line endings and shebangs matter when sharing scripts across OSes.
• Performance: spawning many external processes from either shell is costly—batch work.
• Object formatting in PowerShell can look like “broken text” when piped to bash tools—convert explicitly.

🔗 Related

• pipeline.md
• variables.md
• useful_commands.md
• scripting.md
• cmdlets.md