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I also like that a system touted for comprehensibility and discoverability has the following very commonly used command: Get-ChildItem Guess what it does

by romwell 10y ago

I also like that a system touted for comprehensibility and discoverability has the following very commonly used command: Get-ChildItem Guess what it does by looking at its name. Correct, it lists the contents of a directory! What else could it be? Conversely, if you want to find out what "dir"/"ls" would be in PowerShell, where else would you be looking! I like the idea of PowerShell a lot (object-oriented piping), but I hope it evolves into something with saner default aliases and better documentation, with easy things accomplished easily.

RandomOpinion 10y ago
From a basic data structures class in college, one might recall that nodes in a tree have can have child nodes. Filesystems, most of them anyway, are structured as trees of files and directories. Therefore one would expect a command named "Get-ChildItem" executed against the current directory to do...? (Aside from that, the Powershell default alias set translates both "dir" and "ls" to Get-ChildItem.)
yomritoyj 10y ago
Get-ChildItem also works on things other than directories. And Powershell understands both ls and dir!
- throwaway7645 10y ago
  It knows ls, but there are a lot of UNIX commands it doesn't and it isn't a true implementation, but an alias for running Get-Childitem.
  - ygra 10y ago
    Yes, the point is to get started easily if you're used to another environment, not to be able to use it as a cmd or bash replacement.
detaro 10y ago
Conversely, if you want to find out what "dir"/"ls" would be in PowerShell, where else would you be looking Not so hopeless (although if you ask for detailed docs it opens a browser for you,internet required): PS C:\Users\xxx> help ls NAME Get-ChildItem SYNTAX Get-ChildItem [[-Path] <string[]>] [[-Filter] <string>] [<CommonParameters>] Get-ChildItem [[-Filter] <string>] [<CommonParameters>] ALIASES gci ls dir
noinsight 10y ago
> Correct, it lists the contents of a directory It does so much more than that. It can display child items from any PSProvider (Get-PSProvider): defined aliases, environmental variables, defined variables, defined functions, registry nodes, X.509 certificate containers and even Active Directory paths. "FileSystem" is just one provider amongst many. You can also `cd` to any of these providers to use them in a filesystem-like manner. e.g. `cd HKLM:\`, `cd AD:\` (if you have the ActiveDirectory module) That's why the name is abstract. Many of the default cmdlets work on all kinds of stuff, not just bare filesystem stuff.

by romwell 10y ago

RandomOpinion 10y ago

From a basic data structures class in college, one might recall that nodes in a tree have can have child nodes. Filesystems, most of them anyway, are structured as trees of files and directories. Therefore one would expect a command named "Get-ChildItem" executed against the current directory to do...? (Aside from that, the Powershell default alias set translates both "dir" and "ls" to Get-ChildItem.)

yomritoyj 10y ago

Get-ChildItem also works on things other than directories. And Powershell understands both ls and dir!

throwaway7645 10y ago
It knows ls, but there are a lot of UNIX commands it doesn't and it isn't a true implementation, but an alias for running Get-Childitem.
- ygra 10y ago
  Yes, the point is to get started easily if you're used to another environment, not to be able to use it as a cmd or bash replacement.

detaro 10y ago

Conversely, if you want to find out what "dir"/"ls" would be in PowerShell, where else would you be looking Not so hopeless (although if you ask for detailed docs it opens a browser for you,internet required): PS C:\Users\xxx> help ls NAME Get-ChildItem SYNTAX Get-ChildItem [[-Path] <string[]>] [[-Filter] <string>] [<CommonParameters>] Get-ChildItem [[-Filter] <string>] [<CommonParameters>] ALIASES gci ls dir

noinsight 10y ago

> Correct, it lists the contents of a directory It does so much more than that. It can display child items from any PSProvider (Get-PSProvider): defined aliases, environmental variables, defined variables, defined functions, registry nodes, X.509 certificate containers and even Active Directory paths. "FileSystem" is just one provider amongst many. You can also `cd` to any of these providers to use them in a filesystem-like manner. e.g. `cd HKLM:\`, `cd AD:\` (if you have the ActiveDirectory module) That's why the name is abstract. Many of the default cmdlets work on all kinds of stuff, not just bare filesystem stuff.