PowerShell in Azure Cloud Shell for Windows users

In May 2018, changes were announced to PowerShell in Azure Cloud Shell. The PowerShell experience in Azure Cloud Shell now runs PowerShell Core 6 in a Linux environment. With this change, there may be some differences in the PowerShell experience in Cloud Shell compared to what is expected in a Windows PowerShell experience.

File system case sensitivity

The file system is case-insensitive in Windows, whereas on Linux, the file system is case-sensitive. Previously file.txt and FILE.txt were considered to be the same file, but now they are considered to be different files. Proper casing must be used while tab-completing in the file system. PowerShell specific experiences, such as tab-completing cmdlet names, parameters, and values, are not case-sensitive.

Windows PowerShell aliases vs Linux utilities

Some existing PowerShell aliases have the same names as built-in Linux commands, such as cat,ls, sort, sleep, etc. In PowerShell Core 6, aliases that collide with built-in Linux commands have been removed. Below are the common aliases that have been removed as well as their equivalent commands:

Removed Alias	Equivalent Command
cat	Get-Content
curl	Invoke-WebRequest
diff	Compare-Object
ls	dir Get-ChildItem
mv	Move-Item
rm	Remove-Item
sleep	Start-Sleep
sort	Sort-Object
wget	Invoke-WebRequest

Persisting $HOME

Earlier users could only persist scripts and other files in their Cloud Drive. Now, the user's $HOME directory is also persisted across sessions.

PowerShell profile

By default, a user's PowerShell profile is not created. To create your profile, create a PowerShell directory under $HOME/.config.

mkdir (Split-Path $profile.CurrentUserAllHosts)

Under $HOME/.config/PowerShell, you can create your profile files - profile.ps1 and/or Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1.

What's new in PowerShell

For more information about what is new in PowerShell, reference the PowerShell What's New and Discover PowerShell.