Executing multiple commands( or from a shell script) in a kubernetes pod

Are you running all these commands as a single line command? First of all, there's no ; or && between those commands. So if you paste it as a multi-line script to your terminal, likely it will get executed locally.

Second, to tell bash to execute something, you need: bash -c "command".

Try running this:

$ kubectl exec POD_NAME -- bash -c "date && echo 1"

Wed Apr 19 19:29:25 UTC 2017
1

You can make it multiline like this:

$ kubectl exec POD_NAME -- bash -c "date && \
      echo 1 && \
      echo 2"

The following should work

kubectl -it exec podname -- bash -c "ls && ls"

bin   dev   etc   home  proc  root  run   sys   tmp   usr   var bin  
dev   etc   home  proc  root  run   sys   tmp   usr   var

If above command doesn't work then try too replace bash with one of the following /bin/bash, sh or /bin/sh