Technology Tales

Installing PowerShell on Linux Mint for some cross-platform testing

Given how well shell scripting works on Linux and my familiarity with it, the need to install PowerShell on a Linux system may seem surprising. However, this was part of some testing that I wanted to do on a machine that I controlled before moving the code to a client's system. The first step was to ensure that any prerequisites were in place:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y wget apt-transport-https software-properties-common

After that, the next moves were to download and install the required package for instating Microsoft repository details:

wget -q https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/24.04/packages-microsoft-prod.deb
sudo dpkg -i packages-microsoft-prod.deb

Then, I could install PowerShell itself:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y powershell

When it was in place, issuing the following command started up the extra shell for what I needed to do:

pwsh

During my investigations, I found that my local version of PowerShell was not the same as on the client's system, meaning that any code was not as portable as I might have expected, Nevertheless, it is good to have this for future reference and proves how interoperable Microsoft has needed to become.