Scripting

Most admin work I do is not purely Windows or purely Linux. PowerShell may call Bash, Bash may call PowerShell, and old CMD commands still show up in scripts. This post covers the patterns I use to pass commands and data between those shells, then applies the same idea to USB access in WSL. Quick answer For cross-platform administration, use PowerShell when you need structured objects and use Bash or CMD when you need native platform tools. When crossing between shells, treat the boundary as a text boundary unless you deliberately serialize data as JSON. In WSL, use Windows paths carefully, pass commands with clear quoting, and confirm disk or USB device names before running commands that read or write block devices. ...

These are the PowerShell basics I use most often when writing scripts that need to survive outside a one-off terminal session: pipeline operators, null handling, objects, CSV/JSON output, and script-relative paths. None of these features are complicated by themselves, but using them consistently makes scripts easier to read and easier to troubleshoot. Quick answer Good PowerShell scripts depend on a few fundamentals: use pipeline chain operators for simple success and failure flow, use null-coalescing operators for defaults, pass objects instead of formatted text, export data as CSV or JSON when another tool needs it, and build file paths from $PSScriptRoot so scripts run correctly from any working directory. ...