Powershell for Linux: Combining commands with pipe sign doesn't work

Question

Any way to concatenate commands in Powershell for Linux?

This is what I'm trying to run:

pwsh -Command Invoke-ScriptAnalyzer -Path . | ConvertTo-Json | Out-File -FilePath "/home/administrator/scripts/test.json"

So, run the Invoke-ScriptAnalyzer, convert the results to Json and save the result to test.json.

It doesn't recognize anything after the | sign:

./test.sh: line 1: ConvertTo-Json: command not found

./test.sh: line 1: Out-File: command not found

I need this to go in a bash script, hence the need to launch pwsh with the -Command option.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Answer 1

As written, your | symbols are interpreted by your Linux shell (such as bash), not by PowerShell.

There are two soutions:

• Preferably, quote the entire -Command argument (a '...' string in a POSIX-compatible shell such as bash uses the string's content verbatim):

pwsh -Command 'Invoke-ScriptAnalyzer -Path . | ConvertTo-Json | Out-File -FilePath "/home/administrator/scripts/test.json"'

• Alternatively, individually \-escape all Linux-shell metacharacters that you want to pass through verbatim, such as \| and \" in this case:

pwsh -Command Invoke-ScriptAnalyzer -Path . \| ConvertTo-Json \| Out-File -FilePath \"/home/administrator/scripts/test.json\"

^{Note: In this case, pwsh receives multiple arguments after -Command. However, PowerShell simply joins them before interpreting the result as PowerShell code.
This differs from the command-line processing of POSIX-compatible shells, which interpret the first post--c argument as an implicit, ad-hoc script, with additional arguments getting passed as verbatim arguments to that script, accessible as usual as $1, ...}