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Comment by douche | Hacker News Reader

At least Powershell has Unixy aliases for the common commands.

I don't know how many times I've been in a cmd shell and typed ls and then swore at things.

I just wrote batch files that serve as aliases for those. I type ls in my command shell and it does a dir /w behind the scenes, which makes it look more like how it looks in Linux anyway. Here are the ones I have:

* cat.bat: type %1

* clear.bat: cls

* diff.bat: fc /n /w %1 %2

* ls.bat: dir /w %1%

* pwd.bat: cd

* touch.bat: echo . >> %1

* top.bat: tasklist

All have an @echo off at the top too. Touch is a little janky, because I couldn't figure out how to actually create an empty file with nothing in it from the command prompt.

I'm actually not really a Linux person, but on Mac you kinda have to use these, so I got more used to using them than the Windows counterparts.

    copy nul %1 >nul

to get an empty file. It's not a replacement for touch, though, as touch will do something different to existing files. Your attempt will silently overwrite the file in that case.

Couldn't you just append null to a given filepath to get the same result, or am I misguidedly assuming that >> creates files that don't exist?

Interesting idea, but type nul >> file doesn't change the metadata, perhaps because nothing was written. But yes, it would at least not destroy files.

I just install Gow.

https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow

You could put the @ in front of the command like so:

1 line file: @type %1

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