4. commands detail - a

alias (list all the aliases)

The Powershell equivalent of typing alias at the bash prompt is:

alias (set an alias)

At it’s simplest, the powershell equivalent of the unix ‘alias’ when it’s usedto set an alias is ‘set-alias’

However, there’s a slight wrinkle….

In unix, you can do this

If you try doing this in Powershell, it doesn’t work so well. If you do this:

…then you get this error:

A way around this is to create a function instead:

You can then create an alias for the function:

apropos

apropos is one of my favourite bash commands, not so much for what it does…but because I like the word ‘apropos’.

I’m not sure it exists on all flavours of *nix, but in bash apropos returns a list of all the man pages which have something to do with what you’re searching for. If apropos isn’t implemented on your system you can use man -k instead.

Anyway on bash, if you type:

…then you get:

The Powershell equivalent of apropos or man -k is simply get-help

This is quite a nice feature of PowerShell compared to Bash. If get-help in Powershell shell scores a ‘direct hit’ (i.e. you type something like get-help debug-process) it will show you the help for that particular function. If you type something more vague, it will show you a list of all the help pages you might be interested in.

By contrast if you typed man process at the Bash prompt, you’d just get