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Linux and Powershell

• bszupnick 6y ago
  I think the reason I've been avoiding Powershell is specifically the pattern of `Verb-Noun -Option argument` the author brings up. I'm not saying it's not "better" (however you measure that) but I think it's very wordy and that's always been a turn-off and barrier of entry for me. some examples: pwd --> Set-Location ls --> Get-ChildItem cp --> Copy-Item I totally understand how bash's sometimes seemingly random shortcuts or acronyms can ALSO be a huge barrier of entry (just as it was for me!) and the straightforwardness of Powershell is a lot clearer, but personally now that I'm "in" on the short-hand of bash, it's been hard to start using Powershell.
  • meragrin_ 6y ago
    That's what aliases are for. All three examples are there by default for me as aliases.
  • axiomdata316 6y ago
    I'm not sure if this is relevant but I tried all three of the Linux commands in Powershell and they worked as well.
  • NikolaNovak 6y ago
    Wordiness for some interesting reason makes it HARDER for me to remember stuff. Kind of like I struggled with PMP exam and memorization because "Integrated Change Control Management" became "Controlled Management Change Integration" or "Managed Variation Integration" or whatever in my mind, "Retrieve-Child-Item" vs "Get-ChildItem" or "Send-Command" vs "Invoke-Command" "Remove-Tiingamajiggy" vs "Delete-Whatchamacallit"... my mind is seemingly better equipped to memorize "obscure but unique" gobbledygook rather than "meaningful-but-generic" verbiage :|
    • adzm 6y ago
      I had the same experience, though eventually just having more practice with powershell it ends up second nature. Especially with the ides and completion that can come with it.
    • xorcist 6y ago
      Perhaps PowerShell is the new COBOL?
      • NikolaNovak 6y ago
        Hah, I was thinking of that... I did have to code in COBOL for 6 months in ~2000 and I see some similarities in syntax paradigm (though superficial of course) - but I figured the reference would be too obscure for majority of HN audience :->
      • marcosdumay 6y ago
        The rigid and obscure syntactic structure also checks. It's a couple of hours task for me to define a function, mostly spent on debugging the definition. (Probably, if I did it all the time, I'd get it right every time. Just like creating and using COBOL variables.)
        • Izikiel43 6y ago
          I have the same problem with bash. I have spent hours trying to write a simple function which in PS would have been 10 minutes.
          • marcosdumay 6y ago
            You mean writing the function body? I was not talking about the function body, but about getting the declaration correct. (The bad error messages and lack of real time verification surely contribute here.) PS is more powerful than Bash, it really should be faster to write a function body in it.
    • userbinator 6y ago
  • sterlind 6y ago
    Fwiw, those aliases you mention all exist. I always do "ls" and "cd" for example. But what really annoys me is that there's no aliases for arguments. So "find . -name foo" becomes "ls -Recurse -Include foo" which makes my carpal tunnel just a little worse. It's a shame because the rest of Powershell is so good.
    • Tarean 6y ago
      For commands you use frequently you can still use shortforms, positional arguments, and tab completion, though. For instance in powershell you can also do: ls -r foo
    • stinos 6y ago
      there's no aliases for arguments There are (if implemented by the function), and moreover you can use just shrink the name to the point it becomes ambiguous. Your example is the same a "ls -r -i foo". Also tab completion. You never type those out in full, no carpal tunnel, it's just "l -r" the TAB and select what you want. Discoverability is everything in PS.
    • ygra 6y ago
      There are aliases for parameters, `-ea` for `-ErrorAction` comes to mind. But those are defined by cmdlets, not the user. However, you can always shorten parameter names as long as they remain unambiguous with other parameters, so Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Include foo would become ls -r -i foo which just happens to be shorter than your 'find' example.
    • vips7L 6y ago
      Powershell is smart enough to find the argument as long as it's not ambiguous. For instance: Remove-Item -r -fo ./path/to/some/directory Powershell is smart enough to know that -r means -Recurse and -fo means -Force because the Remove-Item cmdlet has no other parameter that starts with -r. For -f there are two possible arguments: -Filter and -Force which is why you need to be more specific with -fo.
  • voodootrucker 6y ago
    Though I definitely agree that bash's abbreviations are a barrier to entry, I think a bigger impediment not just with bash but many languages (say, Haskell) is ungooglable operator syntax. If you didn't know what it was, how would you figure out what `$(expression)` means in bash for example?
    • sbelskie 6y ago
      Yea, in that case I just search “bash operators” and hope to find a page that includes an example of the one I’m trying to understand.
      • marcosdumay 6y ago
        I think this one is called a "type of quote", not "operator". At least Bash has a very complete man-page, you can just search for `$(` there and you'll find it. But the Bash symbols all have different functions, there are (very few) operators, quotes, variables, and probably more than I can remember.
    • travv0 6y ago
      Haskell has https://hoogle.haskell.org/ https://hoogle.haskell.org/ which lets you search functions named by symbols, function signatures, etc.
    • tck42 6y ago
      bash syntax is terse enough that it's practical at the interactive command line. Thus once you take it up, you take it up for scripts AND daily interactive use. For system operators who use both frequently, between these two you quickly internalize the abbreviations. I can see it being an issue for infrequent users. While it's not terrible, I find powershell pretty frustrating. I started off enthusiastic, especially given how archaic cmd.exe is. As mentioned elsewhere though, the advice not to use aliases, coupled with unbelievably long command names that I hate typing and can't always recall exactly - is it convert-to-csv? to-csv? no it's convertto-csv - I can never remember and I don't feel I should need to use ISE to work around this. This utterly prevents me from internalizing. Even worse, until v3 apparently, iterating over an empty array would fail out (iterate once on $null instead of not iterating at all) and had to be protected with an explicit check. I was on v2, and it was at this point that I completely checked out and decided it wasn't worth learning and that I'd wasted my time. In general I could do what I needed with either cygwin or win32 cpython and those didn't make me feel like clawing my own eyes out. It seems the situation has improved, but I just don't see any reason to take it up again, ESPECIALLY on linux, unless I _have to_ do dotnet stuff, and even if I do I'll explore every other available option first (ironpython? f#? is there a dotnet tcl?) TBH I avoid dotnet anyways given Microsoft's past (EEE) and current (telemetry, start menu ads, etc) behavior. Fool me once etc etc etc.
  • BoiledCabbage 6y ago
    The single most underused command in powershell is: Get-Alias Essentially every command you'd use has a 2 or 3 character alias that is easy to remember and quick to type. On top of it their almost programitacilly named, so if you know the powershell commands full name you can almost certainly guess the alias Typing Get-Alias lists them all out. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.utility/get-alias?view=powershell-7.1 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft...
    • dubcanada 6y ago
      Then you just end up with bash commands again, such as "pwd" and "cat"
      • llimos 6y ago
        Yes, you do. With the advantage of the rich object model. Best of both worlds.
        • ddek 6y ago
          And you can still use the full names in scripts (rather than directly in the shell), so you don’t rely on future readers knowing the aliases.
    • tremon 6y ago
      Aliases don't have short forms for their arguments, so for any serious command you'd still be typing (tabbing) a lot.
      • vips7L 6y ago
        Yes they do. Powershell is smart enough to find the argument as long as it's not ambiguous. For instance: Remove-Item -r -fo ./path/to/some/directory Powershell is smart enough to know that -r means -Recurse and -fo means -Force because the Remove-Item cmdlet has no other parameter that starts with -r. For -f there are two possible arguments: -Filter and -Force which is why you need to be more specific with -fo.
  • jxy 6y ago
    Commonly used terms/functions tend to become shorter and symbolized as some notation, similar to how all the Math notation came to be. A mathematician would be unproductive without those shorthand notations. But I guess there is a balance. Not everyone want to write matrix multiplications as A+.×B, though A%*%B seems acceptable to some, most nowadays write it as np.dot(A,B).
  • alexfrydl 6y ago
    All of those are aliased to the Linux commands and also have their own abbreviations (get-childitem -> gci).
  • chousuke 6y ago
    It also doesn't help that by default (at least in my experience), Powershell's tab completion is slow and annoying to use. I don't know if it's technically inferior, but it feels terrible. It does the thing where you get to cycle through various options instead of completing to the longest common prefix, which is really hard to get used to after years and years of interfaces that do the other thing. It's also difficult to form a repertoire of common shortcuts over time because so many commands share a prefix, so most often the shortest you will be typing is 5-6 characters before you get to anything unique.
    • WorldMaker 6y ago
      The defaults come out of old CMD.EXE (bad) habits, so so yes are missing like a dozen years of Linux terminal UX experimentation/improvements. One particularly common advice with Powershell is to try PSReadLine for more bash-like versions of tab completion and other line editing things: https://github.com/PowerShell/PSReadLine https://github.com/PowerShell/PSReadLine As for common shortcuts, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, Get-Alias (and Set-Alias) is a very useful tool.
    • jodrellblank 6y ago
      > "It does the thing where you get to cycle through various options instead of completing to the longest common prefix, which is really hard to get used to after years and years of interfaces that do the other thing." So change it: Set-PSReadLineKeyHandler -Chord Tab -Function Complete "Bash style completion (optional in Cmd mode, default in Emacs mode)" - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/psreadline/about/about_psreadline?view=powershell-7.1 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/psreadlin...
  • yakubin 6y ago
    More importantly, when you have to adhere to the "Generic Verb-Generic Noun" pattern, the namespace fills up quickly and now creating a new program and sharing it is stifled by two problems: 1. coming up with a name that won't clash with others in already-extremely-limited namespace 2. marketing of a generically-named thing. In the Unix world, let's take top. After top came htop. How would that play out in the Powershell world? List-Processes -> SuperDuperList-Processes?
    • hobs 6y ago
      Powershell recommends a module prefix https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.core/about/about_modules?view=powershell-7.1#how-to-import-a-module https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft...
    • jodrellblank 6y ago
      > "when you have to adhere to the "Generic Verb-Generic Noun" pattern" a) it's GenericVerb-SpecificNoun usually with a name at the front of the noun like Get-YakubinComments, and you don't /have/ to adhere to it. b) there isn't a single namespace, you can use the full name style Microsoft.PowerShell.Core\Get-Command if you want to disambiguate namespaces. c) You can `import-module -prefix ZZ` and then all commands in that module will get your prefix at the start of the noun part, like Get-ZZYakubinComment to avoid clashes. > "How would that play out in the Powershell world? List-Processes -> SuperDuperList-Processes?" No because List- isn't a standard verb, nor is SuperDuperList. Get-EventLog had Get-WinEvent added. Get-WmiInstance became Get-CimInstance. The third party NTFSSecurity module added a Get-Item2 to cover for Get-Item, and a Get-NTFSAccess to cover for Get-ACL. And because it's a shell and can run binaries, there's no problem with you having or running top and htop. or aliasing htop or calling your own thing htop, the Verb-Noun pattern isn't mandatory, it's recommended for companies developing modules so that administrators will have ideas how to list things, add things, remove things, without having to read the manual to find that it's mysterymgmtcli --auth-control -login-create instead of New-ToolUser.
      • mjevans 6y ago
        Namespaces in a shell gives me all the bad vibes of XML namespaces.
  • evad3r 6y ago
    As others have said, aliases do exist, but I don't think you can deny that verb-noun makes learning Powershell a lot easier. For instance, if I want to get a user account, you know that Get-User exists. You can therefore also assume that Set-User also exists as a command. Tab completion helps a lot too with figuring out what options there are.
  • Kuinox 6y ago
    PS C:\Users\Kuinox> pwd Path ---- C:\Users\Kuinox PS C:\Users\Kuinox> ls Directory: C:\Users\Kuinox Mode LastWriteTime Length Name ---- ------------- ------ ---- d----- 2020-11-30 15:39 .android [private info redacted] PS C:\Users\Kuinox> Get-Alias cp CommandType Name Version Source ----------- ---- ------- ------ Alias cp -> Copy-Item Every command you listed are default alias in ps.
    • jodrellblank 6y ago
      > "Every command you listed are default alias in ps." No, ls and cp are not aliases on Linux; the aliases which clashed too much with existing Linux commands were removed in PowerShell core, they only still exist on Windows. PS /> get-command ls,cp CommandType Name Source ----------- ---- ------ Application ls /bin/ls Application cp /bin/cp
    • ur-whale 6y ago
      I that actual backslashes I spy in there? Jeezus.
      • Kuinox 6y ago
        It's on Windows, so yes, path are displayed with backslashes.
  • heresie-dabord 6y ago
    Microsoft may contribute to open source but not all contributions are good. Powershell breaks with every significant open-source language style and is therefore a typically bad investment of time for a non-Windows developer. MS technologies have sometimes been a bad investment for Windows developers too.
    • majkinetor 6y ago
      That is ridiculous. Please don't spread FUD.
• tyingq 6y ago
  Makes me wonder if there might ever be support for standardizing a json input/output schema for all the typical Linux userland stuff, /proc structures, and so on. Then a "jq" like utility would have more value. Having it co-exist with the current "just a bunch of text" isn't ideal though, as you'd be stuck with something clunky like adding a switch to every command. Or an environment variable that changes everything. Or a "j-" version of each.
  • opk 6y ago
    libxo on FreeBSD tries to do this to some extent but a way to turn json back into neat tables is somehow missing (jq isn't great in that regard).
    • tyingq 6y ago
      Ah, that's interesting, thanks for sharing. Their github README does a nice job of showing how it doesn't add a lot of work: https://github.com/Juniper/libxo https://github.com/Juniper/libxo
    • kbrazil 6y ago
      Shameless plug - I created a cli tool called jtbl[0] that converts json output to tables in the terminal. [0] https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jtbl https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jtbl
  • symlinkk 6y ago
    Maybe a better idea would be something like the HTTP Accept header for the shell, where the user can set it once and any supporting application will respond in that format.
  • rossvor 6y ago
    I know there's a project started a few years ago, building something like this for bash called Relational pipes[1]. It's perennially in my "to check out" list and I haven't actually played around with it, mainly because I'm lazy and it's not in AUR. So can't comment how ready it is to use to today. But it looks interesting. [1] https://relational-pipes.globalcode.info/v_0/index.xhtml https://relational-pipes.globalcode.info/v_0/index.xhtml
• Tarean 6y ago
  I love powershell because I have a basic working knowledge of Linux commands. In bash this means I have to google a bit for even slightly complex things like 'change the extension of all .swp files under this directory'. In powershell the short syntax tends to be noisy but I usually can start with the linux commands and muddle through with tab completion: ls -r *.swp | % { mv $_ ($_.FullName -replace ".swp$", ".swap") }
• hyperion2010 6y ago
  I wish there was a sane way to bootstrap powershell without having to use an existing binary release. It is not surprising thought, you can't bootstrap bash using .net core either.
• CraigJPerry 6y ago
  Over the past month I did an experiment of using only powershell, including on my macbook and Linux boxes. I’ve gone back to zsh now though. The benefit of powershell - the rich object data model - isn’t actually that useful in practice day to day. The memory usage is ridiculous for a shell. The killer though is a disregard for economy of expression. The example in the article can be expressed as just “find /path -mtime -3”. I have kept ps on Windows, i didn’t go back to cmd.exe there but WSL2 is still my default when opening Microsoft Terminal.
  • majkinetor 6y ago
    > The memory usage is ridiculous for a shell. I can bring 10 - 30 instances any day in parallel without a glitch and still consuming low amount of mem. Its higher then bash, but again, bash sux and when you have 0 features compared to pwsh you can use lower amount of memory I guess. Bash is ancient, memory was much bigger problem then. Its funny that in age in electron apps we talk about memory when your todo app takes more then anything else. > The killer though is a disregard for economy of expression. ? > the rich object data model - isn’t actually that useful in practice day to day. Its most useful every day feature for me.
• bloblaw 6y ago
  Helge Klein, a long time Windows dev, summed up my complaints about using PowerShell as anything other than a nice shell that sorta feels like *nix: https://helgeklein.com/blog/2014/11/hate-powershell/ https://helgeklein.com/blog/2014/11/hate-powershell/ I still use CMD.exe, so please get off my lawn ;-) When I need the power of Powershell, I use C# (or even Python + Py2Exe if I'm deploying).
  • mjevans 6y ago
    All of those things are bad, but the worst is the variable scoping. Did PowerShell devs learn nothing from what was horrid about PHP?
• ghostpepper 6y ago
  It's funny how the article claims that treating everything like a string is a drawback, when it's often touted as a strength of bash. The author of this piece claims: "Powershell [...] offers a series of commands useful for developing tools and automatisms that are very difficult to implement with simple strings." but as far as I can tell, they don't go on to actually explain any of these cases where Powershell is a more appropriate tool than traditional string-based shells.
  • 13of40 6y ago
    Let me channel Snover really quick: Imagine you need to get the MAC address of a network adapter in Bash. One way to do it would be... ifconfig eth0 | grep -o -E '([[:xdigit:]]{1,2}:){5}[[:xdigit:]]{1,2}' ...another... ifconfig eth0 | awk '/^[a-z]/ { iface=$1; mac=$NF; next } /inet addr:/ { print iface, mac }' Both of these are tied to the way the MAC address is printed in the output of the ifconfig command, and there's no contract that says that can't change. In fact, there are probably versions of it out there where these won't work. In PowerShell you would do this... Get-NetAdapter -Name Wi-Fi | select -ExpandProperty MacAddress This is far more readable if you pass this script on to someone else, it won't break if the way it Get-NetAdapter gets rendered to the screen changes, and best of all, since I know the discoverability tricks in PowerShell, even though I've never done this before, I didn't have to go to stack overflow to find it.
    • rascul 6y ago
      Your example is relevant to show how powershell can handle some tasks better, but this task is better performed with ip than ifconfig, as it has an option for json output which jq can parse: ip --json link show eth0 | jq '.[0].address' I'll admit that the discovery of this is probably not very great. I wouldn't be surprised if a number of people learned about the json output, and possibly jq, from this post.
      • majkinetor 6y ago
        Cherry picking. Not a system feature. Good luck with that in general.
• no_wizard 6y ago
  I think for the devops person or someone doing server administration (sysadmins etc) powershell everywhere must make things easier even with the trade offs (as some have mentioned, it does have a bigger memory foot print, which may or may not matter depending on a host of factors) As a developer? I haven't found PowerShell more useful than zsh/bash or fish (if you haven't, try fish, it has a lot of benefits of PowerShell (fish has its own scripting language that is more "language like", like some of the more simple constructs of Python, syntax wise) but via a simple plugin[0] you get bash compatibility too, and its made for Unix like environments). I do like that it has a rich object data model, I just don't do that kind of thing in my shell. I mostly use aliases, shortcuts, and maybe some grepping. I don't do heavy duty tasks from the command line where I'm not writing the logic in the first place, and I just find it easier to use the standard that my team does (currently, this is JavaScript, with the shebang it executes just like a binary. We can reliably say everyone has the same version of node) Maybe in the future this will change, but I don't see the win to divide my attention economy to it deeply, personally. [0]: https://github.com/edc/bass https://github.com/edc/bass
  • icameron 6y ago
    I agree its more for a devops person, not developers so much. Specifically Windows techs who maybe don't use Linux very often. I've steered a couple of the new IT guys towards it when they ask about how to automate something. Its much easier to learn new, than to learn shell scripts, batchfiles or C#. The only place where I use PowerShell as a developer is in Visual Studio, in NuGet Package Manager. Update-Package, Generate-Migration, Create-Database, etc..
• philstephenson 6y ago
  Lots of people here suggesting the main benefit of PowerShell is its object model and indeed that is very useful, but there are other great features as well. First and foremost, PowerShell basically has a command line parameter framework built in. You also have a runtime backed by one of the best standard libraries out there (.NET) - one in which you can easily reach into anywhere in your PowerShell scripts. It also has a module ecosystem supporting development in either PowerShell or C# proper. And now with PowerShell core it's cross platform. PowerShell also supports pipelines, but I mention this last because it's obviously not a distinguisher for it with bash. It's really not even a contest, PowerShell is way more... well, powerful than bash. Since I've become proficient I would never go back to bash.
  • ojnabieoot 6y ago
    This isn’t necessarily something I’m proud of, but at my old C# job I would do inline C# in Powershell as a very hackish “C# REPL” for prototyping and interactive testing. At the time C# Interactive in Visual Studio was unreliable and I found it easier to just copy-paste C# code into a Powershell script. It seems that C# Interactive has gotten better (and since leaving that job I have switched to 100% F# for .NET stuff). But a more useful application is using Powershell to bundle a .NET class library into a flexible, low-weight, modular command line application for internal use. For instance, a C# library which does serious analytics on large data, and then a Powershell script that deals with easier annoyances like AWS authentication or FTP access, argument parsing, and so on. Obviously a real .exe is a better long-term solution but I found Powershell worked really well for rapidly sharing compiled .NET code into a tool that data scientists on my team could use.
  • mmgutz 6y ago
    I don't think it's a question of it being more powerful than bash. Why does it need to be? I'm not going to use shell script to write apps. There are better scripting languages like python and node for scripting non-trivial apps.
• gchamonlive 6y ago
  Pipes in powershell are just as powerful as in bash. Every curly braces pair is a lambda function with a single parameter $_. You can approach powershell very functionally and the abstractions work fine. It is however a minefield of pitfalls. Obscure error handling at the root script. Always run code at a main function that is called in the root script. Permissive undefined variables and parameters access. Unwinding nested attributes by referring to it at the root object level: what if you need a variable attribute from an object but the attribute collides with a built in method? Truthy and equality are not interchangeable. -eq and Object.Equals produces vastly different results, due to the first not being type safe. Some functions are sintactically similar to flags and parameters: -join. Case insensitivity. Seriously... All in all, if you are mindful of the pitfalls, use Set-StrictMode early on and don't run code at the script root, you are fine. Better than bash. A well written poweshell code is in my opinion way more readable and maintainable by than a well written bash code, despite its shortcomings. However both of them don't come close to what python is in terms of type safety, error handling, legibility, flexibility and maintainability, even for system scripting.
  • addicted 6y ago
    My favorite is that functions don't actually have return statements. A return is just an exit for the function. If you try to assign the output of a function to a variable, it will essentially be a string containing whatever is printed to the console throughout the function's duration.
    • gchamonlive 6y ago
      Oh Man, that can also cause a lot of issues. If you call a function that has a return value but you don't actually need it, like invoke-webrequest, but you use an explicit return statement right thereafter things go haywire. I have yet to produce a proof of concept to illustrate this issue, but I came across this and it actually overwrites my return statement with the orphaned return value from the invoke method. Took me ages to figure out what was wrong, because debugging the application I could see inside the function that the variable I was returning had the expected value, but what was being bound to the outside was something completely different
• jiggawatts 6y ago
  Almost always when I see PowerShell critiqued by people used to Linux and Bash, the criticisms leveled against if often add up to: "I am used to the workarounds for the limitations of my system. Sure, your system does not have these limitations, but what if I need the workarounds, like with my current system?" This is like... AutoCAD before the year 2000. It was digital paper, and acted exactly like a drafting board with pens, rulers, and protractors. It was better than paper, but not by much! SolidWorks came out and blew it away. It was proper 3D, with constructive solid modelling. It could generate drawings of arbitrary projections or cross sections in under a second, saving months of time. Yet... people complained the same way. What if I need drafting tools? What if I want to draw lines manually? How do I draw "just" a circle? Why do I need to define what I'm doing in 3D? Just give me digital paper! That's what I want! I made a comment on YC News nearly a year ago that I'm going to partially repeat below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23257776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23257776 PowerShell is more UNIX than UNIX. Seriously. In UNIX, if you want to sort the output of "ps"... sss... that's hard. Sure, it has some built-in sorting capabilities, but they're not a "sort" command, this is a random addon it has accumulated over time. It can order its output by some fields, but not others. It can't do complex sorts, such as "sort by A ascending, then by B descending". To do that, you'd have to resort to parsing its text output and feeding that into an external tool. Ugh. Heaven help you if you want to sort the output of several different tools by matching parameters. Some may not have built-in sort capability. Some may. They might have different notions of collations or internationalisation. In PowerShell, no command has built in sort, except for "Sort-Object". There are practically none that do built in grouping, except for "Group-Object". Formatting is external too, with "Format-Table", "Format-List", etc... So in PowerShell, sorting processes by name is simply: ps | sort ProcessName And never some one-character parameter like it is in UNIX, where every command has different characters for the same concept, depending on who wrote it, when, what order they added features, what conflicting letters they came across, etc... UNIX commands are more an accident of history than a cohesive, coherent, composable design. PowerShell was designed. It was designed by one person, in one go, and it is beautiful. The acid test I give UNIX people to see if they really understand how weak the classic bash tools they use is this: Write me a script that takes a CSV file as an input, finds processes being executed by users given their account names and process names from the input file, and then terminates those processes. Export a report of what processes were terminated, with ISO format dates of when the processes were started and how much memory they used into a CSV sorted by memory usage. Oh, there's a user called "bash", and some of the CSV input fields may contain multiple lines and the comma character. (correctly stored in a quoted string, of course!) This kind of thing is trivial in PowerShell. See if you can implement this, correctly in bash, such that you never kill a process that isn't in the input list. Give it a go. ... After I posted the above, "JoshuaDavid" provided a correct Bash solution, which blew my mind because I just assumed it was borderline impossible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23267901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23267901 Note how complex his solution is, and that he had to resort to using "jq" to convert the output of "ps" to JSON for the processing! Compare to the solution in PowerShell, of which nearly half is just sample data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23270291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23270291 Clear, readable, and easy to modify even for a junior tech. What I didn't say in that thread was this: I didn't actually bother to work out the solution to my toy problem in PowerShell before JoshuaDavid posted his solution. I made up the problem simply assuming that it's ludicriously difficult in bash -- without checking -- and I similarly assumed that it's trivial in PowerShell -- without bothering to check. I was that confident. Are you still that confident that Bash is superior to PowerShell? Or have you internalised its constraints, and are too used to drawing fiddly little lines on digital paper to realise that your tooling is hopelessly outmatched by solid modelling?
• fartcannon 6y ago
  Telemetry in dotnet is opt out.
• mmgutz 6y ago
  I tried Powershell for cross platform usage. While I didn't put it through the paces, I didn't have any issues on linux. In the end, I ditched it - Powershell is too verbose. I might as well use Python or node. Hard to beat lodash and node.js for processing objects. - Powershell starts slow, almost 2 sec. I use i3 and it's noticeable when I start a terminal with Powershell. Sure it's a one time cost but I'm nerdy like that. - If I work on Windows I use virtual machines or WSL2 obviating the need for a cross platform shell.
• 6d65 6y ago
  I'm a powershell user for about 7 years now, or more. Have a lot of bindings, helpers in my powershell profile, and use it everyday for work. That being said, I'll never use it on Linux as my shell. It's just too slow to start. Fish, nushell, bash, all start instantaneously, powershell (legacy and core), all take more than a second to start, on beefy machines. I've been looking at the powershell core repo in hopes of fixing this with .net core ready to run profile, but they seemed to have something like that in place, but was disabled at that time. Anyway, PowerShell is good, probably the best you can get on Windows(nushell also takes a bit to start, and it's still new). But, on Linux you can do much better, even if that means having to struggle with Bash/Fish scripting. For more complex scripts a full language like Lua or Python are most likely better. Also, last time I checked the docker container for PowerShell Core was easily over 100MB, if I remember correctly. Might work well for a dev machine, where you set it once, but for a CI, it's not ideal.
  • solarkraft 6y ago
    PowerShell 7.2.0-preview.2 starts nearly instantaneously for me on Linux, while it's significantly slower on Windows. The non-core version on Windows takes ages (up to 10 seconds) to start. It's helped a bit by configuring it with -NoLogo, but still extremely slow, especially as soon as there are any modules loaded in the profile.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• Toniglandyl 6y ago
  Well... if it's about complex scripting, you have Python or Perl whose are standard, well integrated, lightweight, powerfull and preinstalled on Linux. If it's for a day to day usage as a shell, bash / fish / zsh... are more concise and faster. The example given on the article : # Get all file modified in the last 3 days Get-ChildItem -Path path -Recurse | Where-Object { $_.LastWriteTime -gt (Get-Date).AddDays(-3) } Is just: find path -mtime 3 in bash ... The object thing is nice, but using strings as output is universal.