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Comment by manojlds | Hacker News Reader

The weird thing was that Powershell for Mac doesn't do this.

It's not that weird, they put the alias' in so new admins on windows fresh from linux don't hit a complete roadblock at the first command they type. Its to make powershell less punishing to learn, not emulate a different system.

So imagine when they packaged that for Mac, that assumption is no longer true.

They got removed in the open-source version of PowerShell and only remain in the Windows build.

They should have implemented these with a missing command handler. So if the ls wget etc exist they work. But just before the command line complains of unknown program name it should check that list and execute the alias.

A new "bottom of the stack" alias instead of the current one that takes precedent over executables.

I would argue that for scripting portability, this should be the same. With wget equivalent in Powershell being so different for example, scripts that use aliases will be broken.

Granted, don't use aliases in scripts and all that.

FWIW, I always thought of it as being for portability of humans, and was very grateful for it on Windows. A large chunk of my time is spent on *NIX systems, so my fingers automatically type "ls" and "rm" instead of "dir" and "del". The fact that Powershell worked, rather than throwing a "eh, what?" error made my time on Windows suprisingly more pleasant.

Possibly because by the time the makers put out the Mac version, they were already aware of the issue, and also because the Mac has the GNU coreutils as part of the main OS, rather than being third-party installs, so the problem was immediately obvious to the first tester who actually used it.

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