That's not the problem MS was trying to fix with the Linux aliases -- the problem they were trying to fix was ergonomics. A lot of us are used to Linux commands and are turned off by Windows shells when we have to learn a new set of commands and can't use `ls`.
In fact, being able to do `ls` rather than `dir` on PowerShell was one big reason I gave it a chance. My other Windows shell experiences have been supremely intolerable because of that.
With curl and wget, Microsoft admits they were overeager.
I think the correct ergonomics would be if you saw:
$ curl http://example.com/foo
Fetching http://example.com/foo by emulating curl
This command is an alias for "...".
If you've installed a real curl command, disable this by typing...
so that you could still use muscle memory to type the commands you know, could see what the actual underlying command is so you could adapt to it, and would know how to use the Real Thing if you have it.
Really? What's the normal output? The content of the URL being fetched. If that message was to STDERR so that curl > foo worked without alteration but the help text still showed up on the console, I think fewer people would be surprised.
The number of bugs about this indicates that people are still being surprised.
In fact, being able to do `ls` rather than `dir` on PowerShell was one big reason I gave it a chance. My other Windows shell experiences have been supremely intolerable because of that.
With curl and wget, Microsoft admits they were overeager.