6d (edited) • The Terminal (General Area)
Every Course 0 command, in bash and PowerShell
Most people who quit the terminal in week one quit because they copied a command off the internet, it failed, and they figured they were the problem.
They weren't. They were on Windows running a Linux command. The commands are different. That was all it ever was.
Here's the one that does the most damage. On Mac or Linux you list files one per line with "ls -1". Run that same thing in PowerShell and you get this:
Get-ChildItem: Cannot find path 'D:\Office-Agent\-1' because it does not exist.
Read it again. It's complaining about a folder you never typed. PowerShell took the "-1" and read it as the name of the place you wanted to look in. Nothing in that message tells you the flag was the problem, so you sit there staring at a path that doesn't exist wondering what you broke.
The ones that catch people most often:
ls -1 -> Get-ChildItem -Name
ls -la -> Get-ChildItem -Force
cat file -> Get-Content file
head -n 10 file -> Get-Content file -TotalCount 10
tail -n 10 file -> Get-Content file -Tail 10
tail -f file -> Get-Content file -Wait
grep "error" app.log -> Select-String -Path app.log -Pattern "error"
find . -name "*.txt" -> Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Filter *.txt
which git -> (Get-Command git).Source
touch a.txt -> New-Item -ItemType File a.txt
mkdir -p a/b -> New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force a/b
rm -rf old/ -> Remove-Item -Recurse -Force old
export KEY=abc -> $env:KEY = "abc"
echo $PATH -> $env:PATH
cmd 2>/dev/null -> cmd 2>$null
One more worth knowing. The && that chains two commands together works in PowerShell 7 and up, but it's a syntax error on the older Windows PowerShell 5.1 that ships with Windows. Check yours with $PSVersionTable.PSVersion. If it starts with a 5, install PowerShell 7. It sits alongside the old one, it doesn't replace it.
The rule that saves you the most time: when something fails, read the error before you retype anything. "The term X is not recognized" means the command doesn't exist on Windows at all. "A parameter cannot be found" means the command is right and the flag is wrong. Those two sentences cover most of what goes wrong in your first month.
Every PowerShell command above was run on a real machine before I posted it. So were the two error messages. The full printable version is in the classroom under Field Notes, free to everyone.
What's the one command you still have to look up every single time? Drop it in the comments and I'll add it to the card.
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Every Course 0 command, in bash and PowerShell
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