commands detail - a

    At it’s simplest, the powershell equivalent of the unix ‘alias’ when it’s used
    to set an alias is ‘set-alias’

    1. set-alias ss select-string

    However, there’s a slight wrinkle….

    In unix, you can do this

    1. alias bdump="cd /u01/app/oracle/admin/$ORACLE_SID/bdump/"

    If you try doing this in Powershell, it doesn’t work so well. If you do this:

    1. cdtemp : The term 'cd c:\temp' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.
    2. At line:1 char:1
    3. + ~~~~~~
    4.     + CategoryInfo          : ObjectNotFound: (cd c:\temp:String) [], CommandNotFoundException
    5.     + FullyQualifiedErrorId : CommandNotFoundException

    A way around this is to create a function instead:

    1. remove-item -path alias:cdtemp

    You can then create an alias for the function:

    apropos is one of my favourite bash commands, not so much for what it does…but because I like the word ‘apropos’.

    I’m not sure it exists on all flavours of *nix, but in bash apropos returns a list of all the man pages which have something to do with what you’re searching for. If apropos isn’t implemented on your system you can use man -k instead.

    1. apropos process

    …then you get:

    1. AF_LOCAL [unix]      (7)  - Sockets for local interprocess communication
    2. Apache2::Process     (3pm)  - Perl API for Apache process record
    3. BSD::Resource        (3pm)  - BSD process resource limit and priority functions
    4. CPU_CLR [sched_setaffinity] (2)  - set and get a process's CPU affinity mask
    6. CPU_SET [sched_setaffinity] (2)  - set and get a process's CPU affinity mask
    7. CPU_ZERO [sched_setaffinity] (2)  - set and get a process's CPU affinity mask
    8. GConf2              (rpm) - A process-transparent configuration system

    The Powershell equivalent of apropos or man -k is simply get-help

    This is quite a nice feature of PowerShell compared to Bash. If get-help in Powershell shell scores a ‘direct hit’ (i.e. you type something like get-help debug-process) it will show you the help for that particular function. If you type something more vague, it will show you a list of all the help pages you might be interested in.

    By contrast if you typed man process at the Bash prompt, you’d just get