3 ms·

I gave powershell a good try but I believe it sucks. too verbose and the syntax is too inconsistent. trying nushell next, it looks very promising.

mr_mitm 3y ago
There are short aliases for the most used Cmdlets and tab completion takes care of the rest. Type "Get-Process -" and then press CTRL-Space for a list of all arguments. That works with any Cmdlet. Impossible in bash. PowerShell is one of the best ideas to ever come out of Microsoft.
- INGSOCIALITE 3y ago
  so one of the best ideas to ever come out of microsoft is an attempt to copy the functionality of bash and incorporate it into their .net ecosystem? i hardly think this is a compliment
  - Already__Taken 3y ago
    > why invent PowerShell, why not just use ksh or bash? I’m a long time Unix dev so that was my first instinct. I tried and failed. There is a core architectural difference between Unix and Windows. Linux is a file-oriented OS and Windows is an API-oriented OS. In Linux, if you can modify a file and run a process, you can manage anything. That is why awk, sed, and grep are management tools. At the time, nothing on Windows worked that way. Everything was behind an API which returned a structured object. That is why awk doesn’t work with WMI, sed doesn’t work with Active Directory, and grep doesn’t work against the registry. I had to invent a new tool that manipulated this environment. - Jeffrey Snover, Powershell Inventor. https://evrone.com/blog/jeffrey-snover-interview https://evrone.com/blog/jeffrey-snover-interview Literally designed not to copy bash.
  - steve1977 3y ago
    It’s not like bash (or UNIX shells in general) have invented command line interfaces…
- rvdginste 3y ago
  I do not understand the "inconsistent" comment either. The "verbose" comment I can follow, but since you have tab-completion, it does not really matter that much. The Get-Help command is super useful, with the option to show examples (-Examples). Consistency is encouraged because every PowerShell command is the combination of a verb and a noun. The verbs are standardised and you can get a list of supported verbs using Get-Verb. Nouns are free to choose. There is also Get-Command which gives you a list of available commands in your current shell. You can import modules in the shell which will give you access to extra commands. Get-Command supports the parameters Module, Verb and Noun to filter commands. This allows you to fairly easily discover commands that might be usefull to you. The Get-Alias command will show you what aliases are defined in your shell. This can sometimes be confusing as some of the default aliases look like Linux/UNIX shell commands. Creating a PowerShell module is also not that hard. When defining a PowerShell command, it is for example very easy to limit the values for a certain parameter and that in turn hooks in into the completion functionality. The completion functionality is available out-of-the-box for every PowerShell command available, including the ones that you create yourself. My main OS is Linux, but I do work a lot with Windows systems (I develop in C#). I've used bash a lot, but I also learned PowerShell because that is simply the way to go on Windows systems. I like PowerShell, it has a lot of nice features and it is easy to work with. I find it a lot easier to program extra functionality in a PowerShell module compared to defining extra functions in bash. As a C# developer, PowerShell basically also gives me access to any C# class available by default in .NET. It is even simple to load a class from a third-party assembly, and even to compile C# code on the fly. In short, I can do whatever I want in PowerShell a lot easier than in Bash. Note that that does not mean that I no longer use Bash. It depends. My default shell on linux is bash. When I need a one-liner to do something, I will first reach for bash. It is only when I need a longer script that I will reach for PowerShell. For example, I need to read a json file, manipulate the json structures and write the data back out. That is something I would do in PowerShell. For a build script that is simply a sequence of steps, I would go for bash, even if it involves the use of jq for json for example. And obviously on Windows, my default shell is PowerShell. Even though I have used cygwin/ming before, I would not do that if I can avoid it... there is really no need to try to run bash or anything else on Windows when you have PowerShell.

mr_mitm 3y ago

There are short aliases for the most used Cmdlets and tab completion takes care of the rest. Type "Get-Process -" and then press CTRL-Space for a list of all arguments. That works with any Cmdlet. Impossible in bash. PowerShell is one of the best ideas to ever come out of Microsoft.

INGSOCIALITE 3y ago
so one of the best ideas to ever come out of microsoft is an attempt to copy the functionality of bash and incorporate it into their .net ecosystem? i hardly think this is a compliment
- Already__Taken 3y ago
  > why invent PowerShell, why not just use ksh or bash? I’m a long time Unix dev so that was my first instinct. I tried and failed. There is a core architectural difference between Unix and Windows. Linux is a file-oriented OS and Windows is an API-oriented OS. In Linux, if you can modify a file and run a process, you can manage anything. That is why awk, sed, and grep are management tools. At the time, nothing on Windows worked that way. Everything was behind an API which returned a structured object. That is why awk doesn’t work with WMI, sed doesn’t work with Active Directory, and grep doesn’t work against the registry. I had to invent a new tool that manipulated this environment. - Jeffrey Snover, Powershell Inventor. https://evrone.com/blog/jeffrey-snover-interview https://evrone.com/blog/jeffrey-snover-interview Literally designed not to copy bash.
- steve1977 3y ago
  It’s not like bash (or UNIX shells in general) have invented command line interfaces…
rvdginste 3y ago
I do not understand the "inconsistent" comment either. The "verbose" comment I can follow, but since you have tab-completion, it does not really matter that much. The Get-Help command is super useful, with the option to show examples (-Examples). Consistency is encouraged because every PowerShell command is the combination of a verb and a noun. The verbs are standardised and you can get a list of supported verbs using Get-Verb. Nouns are free to choose. There is also Get-Command which gives you a list of available commands in your current shell. You can import modules in the shell which will give you access to extra commands. Get-Command supports the parameters Module, Verb and Noun to filter commands. This allows you to fairly easily discover commands that might be usefull to you. The Get-Alias command will show you what aliases are defined in your shell. This can sometimes be confusing as some of the default aliases look like Linux/UNIX shell commands. Creating a PowerShell module is also not that hard. When defining a PowerShell command, it is for example very easy to limit the values for a certain parameter and that in turn hooks in into the completion functionality. The completion functionality is available out-of-the-box for every PowerShell command available, including the ones that you create yourself. My main OS is Linux, but I do work a lot with Windows systems (I develop in C#). I've used bash a lot, but I also learned PowerShell because that is simply the way to go on Windows systems. I like PowerShell, it has a lot of nice features and it is easy to work with. I find it a lot easier to program extra functionality in a PowerShell module compared to defining extra functions in bash. As a C# developer, PowerShell basically also gives me access to any C# class available by default in .NET. It is even simple to load a class from a third-party assembly, and even to compile C# code on the fly. In short, I can do whatever I want in PowerShell a lot easier than in Bash. Note that that does not mean that I no longer use Bash. It depends. My default shell on linux is bash. When I need a one-liner to do something, I will first reach for bash. It is only when I need a longer script that I will reach for PowerShell. For example, I need to read a json file, manipulate the json structures and write the data back out. That is something I would do in PowerShell. For a build script that is simply a sequence of steps, I would go for bash, even if it involves the use of jq for json for example. And obviously on Windows, my default shell is PowerShell. Even though I have used cygwin/ming before, I would not do that if I can avoid it... there is really no need to try to run bash or anything else on Windows when you have PowerShell.