PowerShell has a cheeky approach to cross-OS compatibility. Two of my favourite utilities; wget, and curl, are aliased to PowerShell’s Invoke-WebRequest cmdlet. This is nice and all, but Invoke-WebRequest doesn’t work anything at all like curl or wget do, and sometimes I just want to be able to download a file without mucking around with parameters. Even after installing wget.exe and curl.exe into my path, PowerShell grabs ahold of the unqualified names (that is, no extension):
PS C:\> wget https://abc.xyzStatusCode : 200
StatusDescription : OK
Content : <!doctype html>
<!--[if lt IE 7]> <html class="ie7 oldie" lang="en"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 8]> <html class="ie8 oldie" lang="en"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 9]> <html class="ie9 oldie" lang="en">...
RawContent : HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
Age: 2313
Alternate-Protocol: 443:quic,p=1
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Accept-Ranges: none
It’s doing this using aliases:
PS C:\> Get-Alias wget,curl | ft -autoCommandType Name Version Source
----------- ---- ------- ------
Alias wget -> Invoke-WebRequest
Alias curl -> Invoke-WebRequest
Enter PowerShell profiles. These are a great way to perform an action at the start of every PowerShell session. Because the aliases for wget and curl are built into PowerShell, we can’t simply disable them system-wide. What needs to occur is a per-session removal of them. Let’s add two commands to my profile that will do this:
"Remove-Item alias:wget; Remove-Item alias:curl" | Out-File $profile -Append -NoClobberIf you receive an error along the lines of “Could not find a part of the path” it probably means your profile doesn’t exist. Create it with the following:
PS C:\> New-Item $profile -ItemType file -ForceAfter the changes above, we now see this:
PS C:\> wget https://abc.xyz --no-check-certificate--2015-08-11 09:32:46-- https://abc.xyz/
Resolving abc.xyz (abc.xyz)... 2404:6800:4006:800::200e, 216.58.220.142
Connecting to abc.xyz (abc.xyz)|2404:6800:4006:800::200e|:443... connected.
WARNING: cannot verify abc.xyz's certificate, issued by 'CN=Google Internet Authority G2,O=Google Inc,C=US':
Unable to locally verify the issuer's authority.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: unspecified [text/html]
Saving to: 'index.html'
index.html [ <=> ] 10.54K 44.7KB/s in 0.2s
2015-08-11 09:32:48 (44.7 KB/s) - 'index.html' saved [10793]
Much better!
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