commands detail - a

alias (list all the aliases)

The Powershell equivalent of typing alias at the bash prompt is:

  1. get-alias

alias (set an alias)

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. set-alias cdtemp "cd c:\temp"
  2. cdtemp

…then you get this error:

  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. + cdtemp
  4. + ~~~~~~
  5.     + CategoryInfo          : ObjectNotFound: (cd c:\temp:String) [], CommandNotFoundException
  6.     + FullyQualifiedErrorId : CommandNotFoundException

A way around this is to create a function instead:

  1. remove-item -path alias:cdtemp
  2. function cdtemp {cd c:\temp}

You can then create an alias for the function:

  1. set-alias cdt cdtemp

apropos

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.

Anyway on bash, if you type:

  1. apropos process

…then you get:

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

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

  1. get-help process
  3. Name                  Category  Module     Synopsis
  4. ----                  --------  ------     --------
  5. get-dbprocesses       Function             Get processes for a particul...
  6. show-dbprocesses      Function             Show processes for a particu...
  7. Debug-Process         Cmdlet    Microso... Debugs one or more processes...
  8. Get-Process           Cmdlet    Microso... Gets the processes that are ...

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

  1. No manual entry for process