Windows Powershell has a very sucky replacement for “ls”. It does not support several of the advanced “ls” options. However, it is a wee bit tricky to rerplace the built-in “ls” cmdlet with the msls alternative.

To do that,  you need to unzip msls (viz, ls.exe, grep.exe and dircolors.exe) into c:\windows\system32 directory.

Then add the following to your profile.ps1

$env:LS_OPTIONS = “-bhAC —more —color=auto —recent —streams” set-alias ls “C:\WINDOWS\system32\ls.exe” -option allscope

This will take care of setting the required options to get it to work.

In addition, there is a new grep alternative built on perl called ack. Built on perl, it does 95% of what perl does.

Only problem?

Its not in Python