Equivalent Windows and UNIX Commands

Cross-reference of common commands between *NIX (Linux/macOS) shells and Windows cmd.exe. Useful when moving between platforms during an engagement or writing cross-platform runbooks.

Command equivalencies

*NIX	Windows
cat	type
dig	nslookup
grep	findstr / Select-String (PowerShell)
ifconfig / ip addr	ipconfig
ls	dir
more	more
netstat	netstat
ping	ping
shutdown	shutdown
sleep	timeout
sudo	runas
tcpdump	windump / pktmon
traceroute	tracert
wget	wget (PowerShell alias → Invoke-WebRequest on some builds)
hostname	hostname
whoami	whoami

Shell operators that translate

Operation	*NIX	Windows
Redirect stdout to file	>	>
Pipe between commands	|	|
Run sequentially, stop on failure	&&	&& (cmd, modern)
Run sequentially regardless	;	&

Gotchas

• find ≠ find: Windows find is a string-search filter (like a weak grep), not the UNIX file-search tool. The UNIX-style tool on Windows is dir /s /b or PowerShell Get-ChildItem -Recurse. See findstr for the real grep analogue.
• Aliases in PowerShell: ls, cat, sleep, wget, and curl are aliases to PowerShell cmdlets with different flags — scripts written for cmd.exe may silently change behavior under PowerShell.
• Case sensitivity: Windows paths are case-insensitive; *NIX paths are not.

Sources

• Microsoft Learn — Windows commands reference
• Super User — Windows equivalent of `cat`
• SS64 — CMD commands

Related: findstr, net-windows-command, windows-reconnaissance-commands, linux-reconnaissance-commands, powershell-run-commands