Out of the box, Powershell comes with some aliases matching standard commands, like ls is an alias for Get-ChildItem. I think the intention is to make it more '

Out of the box, Powershell comes with some aliases matching standard commands, like ls is an alias for Get-ChildItem. I think the intention is to make it more 'familiar' for Unix users on the "home" platform, where you don't usually have native Unix commands, but I found they just got in the way and I removed them (aliases like gci for Get-ChildItem still remain, so you don't need an ugly verbose command line, but you do need to learn some new commands). I'll wager that some of your experience was due to these aliases, which just get in the way trying to use it as a Unix shell. So far I've actually been surprised at how infrequently I've encountered the problem you describe. I don't doubt that it's a real problem, but I've generally been pretty impressed with how well a list of lines, which come across a pipeline as an array of strings, mingles with objects. It could be that our "daily driver" tasks have different domains so this mismatch surfaces much more frequently for what you need to do. I've had ideas for better shells for decades, mostly around handling structured data and easy network connections without destroying too much of what makes a shell a shell. So genuinely, respect to you for actually implementing along this path.