Why a binary file copied from powershell using git is different from original file?

Question

Powershell Code

Set-Location 'C:\Users\jdyun\Desktop\fsef'  #Test git repository
git show 18ba8db7d3ddf07a432d5e5ea141a2b779d33eb6:BugTrap.dll > CopiedBugTrap.dll

Copy from Powershell git command

Using Bash

Copy from Git-Bash git command

Copied binary file with git-bash is same binary file size

but, using powershell it is different file size between original and copied

I want to know why this is happening.

Answer 1

"piping" and "redirecting output" in Powershell is a bit of a mess, and doesn't work as in bash (some would simply say : doesn't work).

You can read the answer to the question suggested by @iRon :

Changing PowerShell's default output encoding to UTF-8

Depending on your settings :

• if the file does not begin with a BOM, powershell may try to convert the bytes in the input stream as if they were ASCII text, to a target encoding,
• if you don't tweak your powershell settings, the target encoding defaults to UTF16,
• even when you set the default output encoding to UTF8, I was never able to get rid of the BOM that it would so helpfully insert at the beginning of the output,
• etc ...

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Bottom line is :

• if you want to "extract a file" using git show commit:file > content, stick to bash.
• another way to have both versions, of course, is to rename the current version of the file, and run git checkout commit -- file.

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Quoting the other answer : there seems to be a "Powershell Core" edition which should fix most of these problems ; I wasn't fortunate enough to have this version at hand when I was working with Windows ;)