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Comment by freedrock87 | Hacker News Reader

You can run any command from CMD in Powershell

But are all cmd commands portable verbatim to powershell? With all the options / special characters? (I don't know the answer, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerShell#Comparison_of_cmdle... lists quite a few missing commands, including "talkkill" and "find")

With the amount of online posts that tell you "to achieve X, open command prompt and run ...", it would be a bad idea to break any of them that go beyond a simple command. (so for example any "FOR ..." lines)

There can be several aliases for a single command.

ls=dir=gci="Get-ChildItem"

But you can't run just run "dir /s". You'd have to say "Get-ChildItem -Recurse" which can be shortened to "dir -Recurse" which can be shortened to "dir -r".

When scripting, you try to use the longform versions. With one-liners, you just sort of fall into whatever paradigm you were previously accustomed to for your first argument.

Such basic commands are actually CamelCase? It must be a pain for those with no short-aliases.

Talkkill seems like a very useful feature to me ;)

You can, but sometimes the quoting rules differ.

For example, bcdedit with its {}-delimited GUIDs breaks in PowerShell without additional quoting, but works fine in cmd.exe. Makes following online instructions tricky if you're not familiar with that nuance.

Well, the nice thing in PowerShell is that you have explicit control over "stop parsing here and just pass the rest to the application verbatim" with --%. Solves a lot of quoting nightmares.

How come none of the tutorials I've read and StackOverflow questions involving Start-Process mention that?

Thanks.

Well, it won't work with Start-Process, and it's also buried deep in the documentation and impossible to google. I constantly forget about the exact character sequence, too.

That's indeed nice. I wonder if there is something like that for ZSH.

I don't know for sure about ZSH and can't test it at the moment, but Bash has -- for this purpose. It may work in ZSH as well.

Isn't the -- a feature of the command to stop option parsing and treat the remaining arguments as file names? AFAIK it's not a shell feature that solves quoting (and it's not that easy on Unix either, since running a program involves argument parsing instead of just passing a string).

You could define `--` as "perform no expansions for the rest of the line", then you wouldn't have to worry about globs or `{}` which is where most of my annoyances come from.

BTW `--` isn't treated specially in version 4 of Bash.

Does Powershell support all my old batch scripts?

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