In fcc36d8, I added some extremely weak PowerShell support, this was improved slightly in 504f015. The main issues are the following:

1. Don’t parse the pipeline as text when it is directed from an EXE to another EXE or file. Keep the bytes as-is. PowerShell/PowerShell#1908
2. Improve pipeline for native commands PowerShell/PowerShell#559

Our current workaround is to:

1. wrap all output as hex with a magic prefix when running under PowerShell
2. unwrap all input when we are running under PowerShell and the magic prefix is detected
3. simply accept the fact that PowerShell has no streaming stdin/stdout

If either of the above two PowerShell issues are ever resolved in a way that supports the binary refinery design, the workaround should be removed because it introduces an unnecessary encoding step.