3 ms·

Coming from Unix, this seems super unintuitive, but that's probably just my background. Do you find it tough to figure out what you need to do?

TeMPOraL 11y ago
You have to learn a few things, just like you have to learn them on Unix. You need to familiarize yourself with some basic cmdlets like Get-ChildItem or Format-Table or Sort-Object, etc. Just like you need to learn about ls or grep or the test syntax under Unix. PowerShell is pretty discoverable though (not as discoverable as one may be used to in Lisp ecosystem, but still). For instance, I can fetch the list of properties like the one I pasted in my previous comment by using: Get-ChildItem somefile | Get-Member. It's roughly equivalent to ls filename | <something that would describe the file's properties if the result wasn't plaintext>. Personally, I do find cmdlets a bit cumbersome to type in even with TAB-completion, but fortunately PowerShell defines a lot of aliases - like (again, I'm just copying what I found after typing "alias"): CommandType Name ----------- ---- (...) Alias cat -> Get-Content Alias cd -> Set-Location Alias chdir -> Set-Location Alias clear -> Clear-Host Alias cp -> Copy-Item Alias diff -> Compare-Object Alias dnsn -> Disconnect-PSSession Alias echo -> Write-Output Alias kill -> Stop-Process Alias ls -> Get-ChildItem Alias man -> help Alias mount -> New-PSDrive Alias pushd -> Push-Location Alias pwd -> Get-Location Alias rm -> Remove-Item Alias tee -> Tee-Object (...) So e.g. ls | Get-Member works too. The cmdlets however are often more powerful than their bash/Unix equivalent and - again - they work with objects, which you can always inspect if you're not sure what properties and methods they expose.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

You have to learn a few things, just like you have to learn them on Unix. You need to familiarize yourself with some basic cmdlets like Get-ChildItem or Format-Table or Sort-Object, etc. Just like you need to learn about ls or grep or the test syntax under Unix. PowerShell is pretty discoverable though (not as discoverable as one may be used to in Lisp ecosystem, but still). For instance, I can fetch the list of properties like the one I pasted in my previous comment by using: Get-ChildItem somefile | Get-Member. It's roughly equivalent to ls filename | <something that would describe the file's properties if the result wasn't plaintext>. Personally, I do find cmdlets a bit cumbersome to type in even with TAB-completion, but fortunately PowerShell defines a lot of aliases - like (again, I'm just copying what I found after typing "alias"): CommandType Name ----------- ---- (...) Alias cat -> Get-Content Alias cd -> Set-Location Alias chdir -> Set-Location Alias clear -> Clear-Host Alias cp -> Copy-Item Alias diff -> Compare-Object Alias dnsn -> Disconnect-PSSession Alias echo -> Write-Output Alias kill -> Stop-Process Alias ls -> Get-ChildItem Alias man -> help Alias mount -> New-PSDrive Alias pushd -> Push-Location Alias pwd -> Get-Location Alias rm -> Remove-Item Alias tee -> Tee-Object (...) So e.g. ls | Get-Member works too. The cmdlets however are often more powerful than their bash/Unix equivalent and - again - they work with objects, which you can always inspect if you're not sure what properties and methods they expose.