Practical notes for developers and system engineers
Inspect carriage returns with GNU sed, compare Bash and direct execution, create an LF copy without replacing the original, and check Git line-ending attributes.
Choose where to keep a WSL project by checking where its tools run, comparing Linux storage with mounted Windows drives, and testing a small working copy.
Calculate a file's SHA256 checksum with PowerShell and compare it with the official download value. Understand mismatches, literal paths and what a match proves.
Use git diff --check in PowerShell to find trailing whitespace, inspect staged changes, stage corrections again, and understand exit codes and untracked files.
Check file existence and distinguish files from folders with Test-Path. Handle square brackets with LiteralPath and understand why IsValid is different.
Compare line arrays and whole-file strings with Get-Content -Raw, including newlines, empty files, LiteralPath, encoding, and first or last lines.
Read a JSON file with PowerShell ConvertFrom-Json, retrieve properties and array items, and handle parsing errors. Includes Windows PowerShell 5.1 and PowerShell 7 differences.
Export a WSL distribution to tar, restore it under a different name, and check its files and Linux user while keeping the original Ubuntu environment.
Find matching log lines and line numbers with Select-String. Use literal text, regular expressions, case sensitivity, Quiet and AllMatches.
Combine folder and file names with Join-Path. Handle separators and nested paths, and understand Test-Path, Resolve and version differences.