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What benefits (other than what looks like a scripting language) does PowerShell give over regular command prompt?
by pizza 15y ago
What benefits (other than what looks like a scripting language) does PowerShell give over regular command prompt?
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoIt has ls. Does anything else matter?
- mhitza 15y agoFrom what I remember it has an object oriented style, i.e. you don't have to parse text for a specific column you want (you call the appropriate method). And you also get easy integration with the .NET libraries.
- zacgarrett 15y agoThere are also lots of libraries for powershell that make it very easy to do things. For example MS provides a great way to manage Exchange via powershell. You can even go so far as getting a GUI in powershell. As a sysadmin I use powershell for quite a few automation and management tasks on Windows servers. It is nice to have a interface to the server that I know will always be on the server and will update by itself. There is no need to install a third party scripting language just to script simple things that are difficult to do in the standard windows command line.
- xpaulbettsx 15y agoHere's an example, find all files recursively that are over 100k ls -r | ?{$_.Length > 100*1024} Doing this in Bash or CMD would be annoying (certainly doable though!), especially the recursive part.
- gvb 15y agofind . -size +100k
- xpaulbettsx 15y agoI stand corrected :) I certainly don't want to start a "which is better" argument, just trying to give an example of something interesting in PSh
- burgerbrain 15y ago'ls' has -R too, if you really want to do it like that. Of course, that form in Unix would not be suggested, because there are other far better (readable/concise) ways of doing that. (like the 'find' one someone else just gave you).
- iamelgringo 15y agoDifferences between PowerShell and other *nix shell variants are that PShell allows you to pipe full COM or .NET objects between processes or commends, rather than just piping the text files between different commands. PowerShell vs cmd.exe PowerShell is actually a complete shell scripting language, that gives you full access to all of the .NET libraries and methods. It also has a rather nice IDE that ships with Windows as is. Also, you can use PShell of Exchange and other server automation, you can do remote scripting, and it has some pretty decent security controls baked into the system.
- malkia 15y agoComplete yes, but slow to start up (takes hundredths of ms, even if hot-loaded), and not very syntax friendly.
- recoiledsnake 15y agoHundredths of ms sounds pretty fast
- malkia 15y agoYes, it's okay if it's started once, but if you have to run it over and over then it's not. For example run it 10000 times, and if time it takes 300ms - you are looking at an hour of execution. Some apps (even if they are big) are just naturally cached by the OS in the file system buffers, but others are doing quite of other things before running. If this is going to be a "shell" replacement it needs to start very fast at least in hot mode (cached).
- lloeki 15y ago> PShell allows you to pipe full COM or .NET objects between processes or commends, rather than just piping the text files between different commands. Which is IMHO the best part about unix shell and the worst about PowerShell: being pure text, unix shell allows for very loose definition of the interface between the program and outside, allowing to connect stuff in creative ways with minimal plumbing; whereas PowerShell makes this interface definition quite stringent by comparison, hence needing theoretically less plumbing (at least for simple tasks) but requiring far more design in the interface, restricting connectivity which in turns generates more mediation and plumbing to connect foreign elements. In short unix shell may seem archaic but its loose binding makes it very powerful and quick to solve problems, while PowerShell is, well, a chore.