Docker Platform-Specific Guide

This skill provides detailed guidance on Docker differences, considerations, and optimizations for Windows, Linux, and macOS platforms.

Shell and path conventions used in this skill

Docker commands are mostly identical across platforms, but the surrounding shell utilities are not. This guide uses the following conventions:

• Inside docker exec / docker run containers — commands target a Linux shell regardless of host OS (containers run Linux).
• On the host (Linux / macOS / WSL2) — examples use bash with /dev/null, grep, sed, awk, package managers (apt-get, brew).
• On the host (Windows native PowerShell) — substitute: /dev/null -> $null, grep pattern -> Select-String pattern, sed -i 's/a/b/' f -> (Get-Content f) -replace 'a','b' | Set-Content f. Pipe object output rather than text.
• Docker Desktop on Windows uses a WSL2 Linux VM — bash examples work inside WSL distros. PowerShell users can still run the docker CLI itself; only the supporting Unix tools need translation.

Path quoting: when bind-mounting Windows paths into Docker Desktop, use forward slashes or escaped backslashes (-v C:/Users/me/code:/app or -v "C:\Users\me\code:/app"). The PowerShell host path uses Windows separators; the container path is always Linux-style.

Linux

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