PowerShell Safe Skills

powershell-safe-skills is a Codex/Claude Code skill for every Windows shell task hosted by PowerShell: native argument boundaries, pipelines, ripgrep globs and exit codes, quoted paths, SSH/Plink/WSL/Bash/SQL calls, encoding, filesystem mutation, file locks, and common shell traps.

Install

Codex:

$repositoryUrl = 'https://github.com/Ciender/powershell-safe-skills.git'
git clone $repositoryUrl "$HOME/.codex/skills/powershell-safe-skills"

Claude Code:

$repositoryUrl = 'https://github.com/Ciender/powershell-safe-skills.git'
git clone $repositoryUrl "$HOME/.claude/skills/powershell-safe-skills"

Or tell Codex/Claude Code:

Install the powershell-safe-skills repository as a user-level skill named powershell-safe-skills.

Restart Codex or Claude Code after installing.

Recent update

This release expands the trigger to all Windows shell commands hosted by PowerShell and adds preflight guidance for the most frequent failure modes:

• capture foreach/if/switch output before piping;
• treat rg exit code 1 as “no matches”, not a command failure;
• avoid Bash-style \" escaping and native wildcard paths;
• replace Bash heredocs with PowerShell here-strings or script files;
• verify paths, Git roots, executable discovery, and the active PowerShell version before dependent operations;
• keep passwords, tokens, cookies, and private keys out of command arguments;
• use literal stdin scripts across SSH/WSL/Bash/SQL boundaries; and
• distinguish file locks and encoding issues from syntax failures.

The historical evidence and maintenance summary are kept under references/history-evidence.md and references/history-derived-failures.md.

Invoke

Codex:

$powershell-safe-skills

Claude Code:

/powershell-safe-skills

Important: enter $powershell-safe-skills in the Codex chat box, not at a PS C:\...> terminal prompt. In PowerShell, $powershell-safe-skills is parsed as a variable/expression, not as a skill invocation or executable command.

Layout

This repository is directly cloneable as a single skill:

.
├── SKILL.md
├── agents/
│   └── openai.yaml
└── references/
    ├── native-commands.md
    ├── cmdlets-filesystem.md
    ├── cross-shell.md
    ├── process-encoding.md
    ├── diagnostics.md
    ├── history-derived-failures.md
    └── history-evidence.md

history-derived-failures.md and history-evidence.md are audit/maintenance appendices. They are not intended to be loaded for ordinary PowerShell command execution.

PowerShell Scope

Default target: Windows PowerShell automation through PowerShell 7+ (pwsh.exe).

Compatibility target: Windows PowerShell 5.1 (powershell.exe) when explicitly required. Core safety rules still apply, but command behavior and parameters can differ, so verify in the active shell.

Validate

From this repository root:

python "$env:USERPROFILE\.codex\skills\.system\skill-creator\scripts\quick_validate.py" .

Expected result:

Skill is valid!