The aws command is a little different than the other Pacu commands. This is essentially a command that directly integrates the AWS CLI into Pacu, so you can run AWS CLI commands without needing to exit out of Pacu. The way it works is if Pacu detects a command that is run that starts with aws as the first word, it will drop the entire command to the bash shell on the host. This means you can treat any aws command within Pacu as if it were a bash command, because it is. This allows you to pipe or redirect the output of your AWS CLI command to wherever you need it on the system.

Something extremely important to note is that Pacu and the AWS CLI use two separate methods of credential storage. Pacu handles its credentials independently, and the AWS CLI handles its credentials separately. This means that if you are within Pacu with SecondExampleUser as your active set of keys, the AWS CLI will not use those same credentials, unless you specify it correctly within the AWS CLI. The AWS CLI will act normally, as if you ran it from the bash command line, so that means the default AWS CLI profile will be used automatically, unless you specify a separate profile with the --profile argument.

The following screenshot shows the aws ec2 describe-instances command being run from within Pacu, and because it is passed to the bash shell, it is then piped into grep so that the output can be searched for the ImageId word and we can see the image ID of the EC2 instance that was found:

We didn't specify an AWS CLI profile to use, so it automatically used the default profile, not the SecondExampleUser Pacu key pair.