I've been playing with OpenSSH on Windows and it looks like the normal Unix aliases are missing. I'm not sure whether it's starting powershell or cmd when I log in to a Windows machine via SSH. What's the correct way to see the currently running shell on Windows?
2 Answers
All credit goes to PetSerAl, this had to be posted as an aswer:
(dir 2>&1 *`|echo CMD);&<# rem #>echo PowerShell
Within Win32-OpenSSH this command also works, and outputs CMD.
NB : Win32-OpenSSH seems a bit limited, cd is not recognized on my system.
3 Comments
Marcus Ottosson
Sadly this trick doesn't work with PowerShell 6+, if one wanted to detect whether it's powershell.exe or pwsh.exe :(
Rajan
Can't I just execute a Powershell specific command, If it's working then it's Powershell else CMD? like
$PROFILE or ls
gore
@marcus Ottoson: but works on PoweShell 7.1.5
I'd like to expand on @sodawillow's answer to also distinguish between using Powershell (powershell.exe) known as Desktop and PWSH (pwsh.exe) known as Core.
(dir 2>&1 *`|echo CMD);&<# rem #>echo ($PSVersionTable).PSEdition
# Returns one of: CMD, Core, Desktop
This works in all instances where a sub-shell is not instantiated. What that means is that it does not work from opening a default sub-process in Python, as it always uses CMD when interacting with windows. This is actually set by the Windows environment variable: ComSpec always pointing to C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe.
For example:
(Starting the python interpreter from a pwsh shell.)
>>> import os, subprocess
>>> c="(dir 2>&1 *`|echo CMD);&<# rem #>echo($PSVersionTable).PSEdition"
>>> subprocess.call(c,shell=True)
CMD
For other Python shell detection schemes, please see this good post.
UPDATE: 2020-05-01
I managed to get the above working, but with the obnoxious side effect of always loading the powershell profile, before executing. The trick was to specify execute=<path-to-powershell-exe> like this:
(Start a python CLI.)
import os, subprocess
c="(dir 2>&1 *`|echo CMD);&<# rem #>echo($PSVersionTable).PSEdition"
e="C:\\Windows\\System32\\WindowsPowerShell\\v1.0\\powershell.exe"
subprocess.call(c, shell=True, executable=e)
# output:
# <blah blah from profile>
# Desktop
# 0
I have not been able to circumvent the powershell profile issue. But apparently it is something being worked on. See here and here.
3 Comments
mikemaccana
Great answer! Note 'core' isn't a thing anymore since Powershell 7. It's just 'Windows Powershell' and 'Powershell'.
not2qubit
@mikemaccana Interesting, and perhaps good. But it still returns "Core"...
not2qubit
@mikemaccana I managed to get a step further, but I'm not able to avoid loading the profile. There is also a mysterious
0 at the very end of the output.
(dir 2>&1 *`|echo CMD);&<# rem #>echo PowerShelldirto invoke cmd.exe's dir command (which my profile does). But it's pretty clever nonetheless.typeorecho:(type 2>&1 -ea ig .|echo CMD);&<# rem #>echo PowerShell