PowerShell Core for Linux Administrators Cookbook

Convenience aliases

One important point to note is that commands such as ls and mkdir are aliases in Windows PowerShell, which means that running ls on Windows PowerShell would run Get-ChildItem in the background (this is also true for PowerShell on Windows). In Linux, however, running ls from within PowerShell would run the actual ls command; ls is not an alias in PowerShell on Linux—it is the command itself, whose output would be plain text. You can validate this by running ls | Get-Member on PowerShell on Linux, and comparing it with PowerShell on Windows as well as Windows PowerShell (it is, therefore, good to stick to the best practice of not using aliases in scripts):

PowerShell knows whether it is running on Linux, Windows, or macOS ...