Shell (e.g. Bash) users before coming to Windows Terminal - which shell do you use?

Do you use PowerShell or cmd.exe? Or something else, like Git-bash or WSL?

How do you learn commands? PS and cmd.exe have different commands.

Some of commands I need are

• which => Get-Command
• head (I don't need cat) => gc log.txt | select -first 5

Comments

[shadowtime2000]

I use cmd.exe and occasionally Git-bash when it is required for a projects build setup or something. I rarely use commands other than mkdir and cd because I mainly just use Yarn or NPM CLI commands along with code .

[Mohamed Dahir]

If you have wsl1/wsl2 installed, any commands from wsl can be used in Windows land if you prefix it with wsl e.g wsl touch file.txt.

devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline...

[Pacharapol Withayasakpunt]

Thanks. I totally forgot that I can do that, no matter cmd.exe or PowerShell.

wsl which python # /mnt/c/Users/Pacharapol W/.pyenv/pyenv-win/shims/python

Surprisingly, this points to the correct answer.

Not to mention that these are useful

wsl du -sh *
wsl head bigfile.csv

Though, I personally don't get the purpose of wsl touch new.txt. I know it creates or modifies timestamp, but why?

[Mohamed Dahir]

I only have used the touch command to create new files. I am not sure either what is the purpose of modifying file timestamps.

[Austin S. Hemmelgarn]

For stuff that actually has to be run on Windows, PowerShell. It has default aliases that make it easier to adapt to from POSIX sh, and it’s far more capable than CMD even if you do have to quote things more.

In all other cases, I just boot into Linux when I need a shell environment for something...