PowerShell

Properties1
tagstools, shell, windows

powershell is Windows’ shell and scripting engine. Persistent config lives in $PROFILE.

Activate Readline Keybindings

Add to $PROFILE (typically \Documents\PowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1) to switch PSReadLine to Emacs-style bindings (Ctrl+A/Ctrl+E for line start/end, Ctrl+R for reverse search, etc.) instead of the default Windows -EditMode.

Stream Redirection

PowerShell has 6 numbered output streams, not just stdout/stderr: 1 Success, 2 Error, 3 Warning, 4 Verbose, 5 Debug, 6 Information. Redirect any of them to a file or merge them into another stream with >&.

  • > and 2> redirect a single stream (overwrite); >> and 2>> append instead.
  • *> redirects all streams at once; *>> appends all streams.
  • 2>&1 merges stream 2 into stream 1 (any n>&1 works, must come last on the line).
  • Redirecting to $null discards a stream instead of writing it to disk.

Cheatsheet

Activate Readline Keybindings

Set-PSReadLineOption -EditMode Emacs

Stream Redirection

Get-Item ./missing > out.txt        # success stream to file, overwrite
Get-Item ./missing 2> err.txt       # error stream to file
Get-Item ./missing *> all.txt       # every stream to file
Get-Item ./missing >> out.txt       # append success stream
Get-Item ./missing 2>&1             # merge error stream into success stream
Get-Item ./missing 2> $null         # discard error stream

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