Basic File System commands in Powershell

Below is the list of file commands in Windows Powershell.

Displaying the contents of file

Here is the syntax of cat command.

> cat <file-name>

Deleting entire data from a file

To make the file empty, we can use “Clear-Content” (also called as clc) command.

> clc <file-name>

Creating a directory using mkdir (New-Item) command 

> mkdir <directory-name>

Deleting a file or a directory using rm (Remove-Item) command 

> rm  <file-name-or-directory-name>

To delete the files recursively in a directory, you can use below command.

> rm  -r <directory-name>

Copying files using cp (Copy-Item, cpi, copy) command

Here is the syntax of cp command.

cp <source-file> <destination-file>

Moving files using mv (Move-Item, mi, move) command

You can use below command to rename a file.

$ mv <old-file> <new-file>

You can use below command to move a file.

$ mv <source-file> <destination-file>

You can use below command to move a file forcefully.

$ mv -fo <source-file> <destination-file>

Rename item

Rename-Item <original-file-name> <new-file-name>

Listing files and directories using ls (dir, gci, Get-ChildItem) command.

“ls” command shows the list of file and directory names in the current directory. But You can also specify the names of directories explicitly.

$ ls dir1, dir2

Resolving paths

You can use below command to find out the absolute path of the specific files.

> Resolve-Path <file-name>

Check if file exists

You can use below command to check if specific file exists. This will display output as true if the specified file exists.

Test-Path “f1.*”

Display and set present working directory

You can use “pwd” (Get-Location, gl)command to display present working directory.

To change the working directory , you can use “cd” (chdir, sl, Set-Location) command.

Set-Location <directory-name>

pushd (Push-Location) and popd(Pop-Location) commands in Powershell

These commands are used to switch to multiple directories with ease.