Tag: windows

Microsoft PowerShell – don’t you mean Windows PowerShell?

Nope.

If you have a Windows 11, 10, 8.1, 8.0 or 7 machine, it would have come “with default” with Windows PowerShell – however, Microsoft has replaced that with a new “multiplatform” version which – in their infinite wisdom – have decided to call Microsoft PowerShell but haven’t “forcibly upgraded” people (you can upgrade yourself via their “Installing PowerShell on Windows” guide).

Microsoft do have a webpage about the differences between the PowerShells if you want to read: but if you use the command line a lot, it might be worth looking at Windows Terminal as well.

Which version of PowerShell do I have?

If you type/copy:

(Get-Host).Version

into the shell, you’ll get:

• A “Major” version number of 7 or above = (new) Microsoft PowerShell
• A “Major” version number of 5 or lower = (old) Windows PowerShell
• A “Major” version number of 6 = I don’t think this actually exists and therefore should be used as the “cut-off” point between the two.
• “.Version was unexpected at this time” = Probably using Windows Command Prompt
• “-ash: syntax error: unexpected word” = You are in a shell of a Linux machine!
• “bash: syntax error unexpected token `.Version’ = Linux again!

As an example, here’s a single line Linux “command script” which uses curl to fetch a page from https://api.example/latest , parse it for the first occurrence of the text:

"tag_name":"v..."

(where v…. is any sequence of characters starting with “v” and ending with a quote mark) and store that as $VERSION then pass that to curl again to download that specific version zip file from https://example.com/v${VERSION}.zip as “example.zip” (replacing ${VERSION} with the extracted version number), unzip it and then delete the downloaded .zip file.

And, yes, I’ve colour coded the appropriate sections so you can see which command “maps” to which other command.

Linux Example

VERSION=$(
 curl --silent "https://api.example.com/latest" | \
 grep '"tag_name":' | \
 sed -E 's/.*"v([^"]+)".*/\1/' \
) && curl -L https://example.com/v${VERSION}.zip -o example.zip \
&& unzip example.zip && rm example.zip

Windows PowerShell 7 Example

if (((Invoke-WebRequest "https://api.example.com/latest").Content) -match '"tag_name":"v(?<ver>[^"]+)"') {
$VERSION=$Matches.ver &&
Invoke-WebRequest "https://example.com/v${VERSION}.zip" -OutFile example.zip &&
Expand-Archive example.zip && Remove-Item example.zip }