Piping native | native or $bytes | native or native > file will no longer corrupt binary data

[SeeminglyScience]

Prerequisites

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Summary

Previously, the output of every native command (aka console application) would first be encoded into strings before being sent to downstream command or file. This was also true for all input passed to a native command.

With the change in PowerShell/PowerShell#17857 there are some specific scenarios where this is no longer the case.

Details

These examples previously did not work, but will work as expected with the changes.

$uri = 'https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/download/v7.3.4/powershell-7.3.4-linux-x64-fxdependent.tar.gz'

# native to native
curl.exe -s -L $uri | tar -xzvf - -C .

# native to file
curl.exe -s -L $uri > powershell.tar.gz

# bytes to native
(Invoke-WebRequest $uri).Content | tar -xzvf - -C .

# bytes to native (all at once as byte[])
,(Invoke-WebRequest $uri).Content | tar -xzvf - -C .

Articles

• reference/7.4/Microsoft.PowerShell.Core/About/about_Pipelines.md

Related Source Pull Requests

• Preserve stdout byte stream for native commands PowerShell/PowerShell#17857

Related Source Issues

• Don’t parse the pipeline as text when it is directed from an EXE to another EXE or file. Keep the bytes as-is. PowerShell/PowerShell#1908