Power Shell cheat sheet

I figured that I should keep track of some useful command-line tools that I am learning, so I’ll write down them as blog posts and keep updating them.

edit 2026-05-25: added a few commands around finding which executable is actually being used on Windows, and a couple of related PATH debugging tricks.

Benchmarking .NET 7

I got started by this video

Measure-Command

Default output of Measure-Command, using git.exe as a benchmark for a real-life native application:

PS C:\> Measure-Command { git.exe --version | Out-Default }
git version 2.35.1.windows.2


Days              : 0
Hours             : 0
Minutes           : 0
Seconds           : 0
Milliseconds      : 47
Ticks             : 476314
TotalDays         : 5.51289351851852E-07
TotalHours        : 1.32309444444444E-05
TotalMinutes      : 0.000793856666666667
TotalSeconds      : 0.0476314
TotalMilliseconds : 47.6314

we can limit the result to TotalMilliseconds only:

PS C:\> ( Measure-Command { git.exe --version } ).TotalMilliseconds
47.8714

comparing to a full C# command line application using .NET runtime, this time Plastic SCM

PS C:\> ( Measure-Command { cm.exe version } ).TotalMilliseconds
395.9726

with a simple C# console app I get better results (note that in this instance the Release build doesn’t run any faster):

PS C:\Workspace\NETConsoleApp1> (Measure-Command {.\bin\Debug\net7.0\NETConsoleApp1.exe}).TotalMilliseconds
83.2977

Then, publishing as a Native application, Ahead Of Time (AOT) compilation of .NET 7.0:

dotnet publish -r win-x64 -c Release -p:PublishAot=true

gives us a bigger application, but much faster to start:

PS C:\Workspace\NETConsoleApp1> (Measure-Command {.\bin\Release\net7.0-windows7.0\win-x64\publish\NETConsoleApp1.exe}).TotalMilliseconds
24.717

ConvertFrom-Json

An equivalent to unix | jq Json reader/formatter in PowerShell

curl.exe http://localhost:18104/api/xxx -X GET -H "content-type: application/json" --header "Authorization: <token>" | ConvertFrom-Json

Find which executable is actually being used

In PowerShell, list all matches across PATH, in the order they would be resolved:

Get-Command cmake.exe -All | Select-Object Source

Or, the cmd.exe equivalent (also works from PowerShell since it is just an .exe):

where cmake

Resolve the single path that will be executed

If you just want the one binary that would actually run:

(Get-Command cmake.exe).Path

Check the current PATH order

Useful right after the previous command, to understand why the wrong copy wins, listing one entry per line in resolution order:

$env:Path -split ';'

To filter only the likely culprits:

$env:Path -split ';' | Select-String -Pattern 'cmake'

And to do the same for the user-scoped or machine-scoped PATH :

[Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable('PATH', 'User')    -split ';'
[Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable('PATH', 'Machine') -split ';'

List environment variables

PowerShell exposes environment variables as a drive:

Get-ChildItem env:
Get-ChildItem env:Path