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I've been writing Shell scripts for... well, over ten years at this point. I don't believe I've ever parsed output from ls. Definitely not with sed or awk. I

I've been writing Shell scripts for... well, over ten years at this point. I don't believe I've ever parsed output from ls. Definitely not with sed or awk. I don't think that any Linux admin worth their salt would do that. Needless to mention that neither ls nor sed nor awk have anything to do with Shell. > What essential stuff is missing? Since Microsoft tried to replace not just the shell, but the entire set of utilities with PowerShell, they forgot about xargs, for example. But, if we are talking about the shell proper, then things that are missing would be a serialization format that would allow one to pretend that remote shell sends "objects" rather than strings. Most importantly, however, PowerShell is an attempt to fix the problem at the wrong level. The reality of the OS it's running on is that processes take command line and environment variables, and they don't take objects. They return exit codes and two or more output streams, they don't return objects. PowerShell is trying to pretend that communication between processes happens in objects, but that's a lie, and it shows. In any non-trivial use of such a shell, you will have to escape the objects, and face the reality of what's happening underneath. That's why earlier in the days, when objects were a novelty programmers thought that a programming language that is object-oriented from the bottom up is preferable to the one which implements objects as a library. PowerShell is even worse in this sense than Perl or Common Lisp. Objects in PowerShell aren't an afterthought. The authors wanted them from the start, but couldn't have them. Unfortunately, we live in the world where most popular projects we use today were still-born in engineering terms (eg. Unix, and later Linux, any Fortran-like language created since 80's etc.) So, it may as well happen that PowerShell will succeed in terms of popularity, but it's broken by design unless we completely replace the whole way we work with processes... and I don't see it happening unless there's some cataclysmic event that wipes most of us out.

Kwpolska 4y ago
> Since Microsoft tried to replace not just the shell, but the entire set of utilities with PowerShell, they forgot about xargs, for example. You can just use foreach with an array or a multi-line string: $newFiles | foreach { git add $_ } > Most importantly, however, PowerShell is an attempt to fix the problem at the wrong level. The reality of the OS it's running on is that processes take command line and environment variables, and they don't take objects. They return exit codes and two or more output streams, they don't return objects. PowerShell is trying to pretend that communication between processes happens in objects, but that's a lie, and it shows. In any non-trivial use of such a shell, you will have to escape the objects, and face the reality of what's happening underneath. If you’re executing processes, then yes, things might get hairy. But if you’re using PowerShell cmdlets (which either do the thing natively, or call a subprocess and parse it to an object), the object-oriented stuff is really convenient and powerful. Here’s a random example of fancy PowerShell things. How can you do this (filter by a keyword, group by parent directory, and sort the results by count) with UNIX tools? What magic combination of ls, find, sed, grep, awk, sort, uniq would solve this? Get-ChildItem -Recurse C:\Stuff | Where-Object {$_.FullName -notmatch "xyz"} | Group-Object Directory | Sort-Object -Descending Count
- crabbone 4y ago
  > You can just use foreach That's not what xargs does though... > If you’re executing processes, This is why shells exists. They don't exist to execute cmdlets. Nobody cares about that. Cmdlets are about internal functionality of the shell. Executing processes is the service shell provides to it's users. > What magic ...? I don't know what that code does. I don't have Windows, and wouldn't install Microsoft's products on my own or company's computer... But, my guess would be that it would take about half the effort that it took you to write this. What magic to you is not magic to me, because I know that stuff. You must know PowerShell better than I do. I simply know enough not to use it. I don't care about the gory details.

Kwpolska 4y ago

> Since Microsoft tried to replace not just the shell, but the entire set of utilities with PowerShell, they forgot about xargs, for example. You can just use foreach with an array or a multi-line string: $newFiles | foreach { git add $_ } > Most importantly, however, PowerShell is an attempt to fix the problem at the wrong level. The reality of the OS it's running on is that processes take command line and environment variables, and they don't take objects. They return exit codes and two or more output streams, they don't return objects. PowerShell is trying to pretend that communication between processes happens in objects, but that's a lie, and it shows. In any non-trivial use of such a shell, you will have to escape the objects, and face the reality of what's happening underneath. If you’re executing processes, then yes, things might get hairy. But if you’re using PowerShell cmdlets (which either do the thing natively, or call a subprocess and parse it to an object), the object-oriented stuff is really convenient and powerful. Here’s a random example of fancy PowerShell things. How can you do this (filter by a keyword, group by parent directory, and sort the results by count) with UNIX tools? What magic combination of ls, find, sed, grep, awk, sort, uniq would solve this? Get-ChildItem -Recurse C:\Stuff | Where-Object {$_.FullName -notmatch "xyz"} | Group-Object Directory | Sort-Object -Descending Count

crabbone 4y ago
> You can just use foreach That's not what xargs does though... > If you’re executing processes, This is why shells exists. They don't exist to execute cmdlets. Nobody cares about that. Cmdlets are about internal functionality of the shell. Executing processes is the service shell provides to it's users. > What magic ...? I don't know what that code does. I don't have Windows, and wouldn't install Microsoft's products on my own or company's computer... But, my guess would be that it would take about half the effort that it took you to write this. What magic to you is not magic to me, because I know that stuff. You must know PowerShell better than I do. I simply know enough not to use it. I don't care about the gory details.