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Every time I see a “good” bash script it reminds me of how incredibly primitive every shell is other than PowerShell. Validating parameters - a built in declar

Every time I see a “good” bash script it reminds me of how incredibly primitive every shell is other than PowerShell. Validating parameters - a built in declarative feature! E.g.: ValidateNotNullOrEmpty. Showing progress — also built in, and doesn’t pollute the output stream so you can process returned text AND see progress at the same time. (Write-Progress) Error handling — Try { } Catch { } Finally { } works just like with proper programming languages. Platform specific — PowerShell doesn’t rely on a huge collection of non-standard CLI tools for essential functionality. It has built-in portable commands for sorting, filtering, format conversions, and many more. Works the same on Linux and Windows. Etc… PS: Another super power that bash users aren’t even aware they’re missing out on is that PowerShell can be embedded into a process as a library (not an external process!!) and used to build an entire GUI that just wraps the CLI commands. This works because the inputs and outputs are strongly typed objects so you can bind UI controls to them trivially. It can also define custom virtual file systems with arbitrary capabilities so you can bind tree navigation controls to your services or whatever. You can “cd” into IIS, Exchange, and SQL and navigate them like they’re a drive. Try that with bash!

wruza 2y ago
My issue with powershell is that it’s niche language with a niche “stdlib” which cannot be used as general purpose. The same issue I have with AHK. These two are languages that you use for a few hours and then forget completely in three weeks. Both of them should be simply python and typescript compatible dlls. You can “cd” into IIS, Exchange, and SQL and navigate them like they’re a drive. Try that with bash! This exists.
teyc 2y ago
And for anyone who might be open to trying powershell, the cross platform version is pwsh. Pythonistas who are used to __dir__ and help() would find themselves comfortable with `gm` (get-member) and get-help to introspect commands. You will also find Python-style dynamic typing, except with PHP syntax. $a=1; $b=2; $a + $b works in a sane manner (try that with bash). There are still funny business with type coercion. $a=1; $b="2"; $a+$b (3); $b+$a ("21"); I also found "get-command" very helpful with locating related commands. For instance "get-command -noun file" returns all the "verb-noun" commands that has the noun "file". (It gives "out-file" and "unblock-file") Another nice thing about powershell is you can retain all your printf debugging when you are done. Using "Write-Verbose" and "Write-Debug" etc allows you to write at different log levels. Once you are used to basic powershell, there are bunch of standard patterns like how to do Dry-Runs, and Confirmation levels. Powershell also supports closures, so people create `make` style build systems and unit test suites with them.
ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
The big problem with trying to move on from BASH is that it's everywhere and is excellent at tying together other unix tools and navigating the filesystem - it's at just the right abstraction level to be the duct tape of languages. Moving to other languages provides a lot more safety and power, but then you can't rely on the correct version being necessarily installed on some machine you haven't touched in 10 years. I'm not a fan of powershell myself as the only time I've tried it (I don't do much with Windows), I hit a problem with it (or the object I was using) not being able to handle more than 256 characters for a directory and file. That meant that I just installed cygwin and used a BASH script instead.
richbell 2y ago
I am Microsoft hater. I cannot stand Windows and only use Linux. PowerShell blows bash out of the water. I love it.
- sweeter 2y ago
  except for the fact that it is slower than hell and the syntax is nuts. I don't really understand the comparison, bash is basically just command glue for composing pipelines and pwsh is definitely more of a full-fledged language... but to me, I use bash because its quick and dirty and it fits well with the Unix system. If I wanted the features that pwsh brings I would much rather just pick a language like Golang or Python where the experience is better and those things will work on any system imaginable. Whereas pwsh is really good on windows for specifically administrative tasks.
  - hollerith 2y ago
    The fact that it is "basically just command glue for composing pipelines" makes it even more regrettable that it takes more knowledge and mental focus to avoid shooting my foot off in bash than it does in any other programming language I use.
    - skydhash 2y ago
      If you're trying to write a full fledged program in it, it's going to be a pain as there are only strings (and arrays, I think). Bash is for scripting. If you have complex logic to be done, use another programming language like perl, ruby, python, $YOUR_PREFERRED_ONE,...
      - jiggawatts 2y ago
        You’re arguing that the power of PowerShell is pointless because you’ve resorted to alternatives to bash… because it’s not good enough for common scenarios. This is Stockholm Syndrome. You’ve internalised your limitations and have grown to like them.
sgarland 2y ago
Bash also has a built-in to validate parameters; it’s called test, and is usually called with [], or [[]] for some bash-specifics. Re: non-standard tools, if you’re referring to timeout, that’s part of GNU coreutils. It’s pretty standard for Linux. BSDs also have it from what I can tell, so it’s probably a Mac-ism. In any case, you could just pipe through sleep to achieve the same thing. > …inputs and outputs are strongly typed objects And herein is the difference. *nix-land has everything as a file. It’s the universal communication standard, and it’s extremely unlikely to change. I have zero desire to navigate a DB as though it were a mount point, and I’m unsure why you would ever want to. Surely SQL Server has a CLI tool like MySQL and Postgres.
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  The CLI tool is PowerShell. You just said everything “is a file” and then dismissed out of hand a system that takes that abstraction even further! PowerShell is more UNIX than UNIX!
  - sgarland 2y ago
    What? How are typed objects files? What I’m saying is that in *nix tooling, things are typically designed to do one thing well. So no, I don’t want my shell to also have to talk MySQL, Postgres, SQL Server, DB2, HTTP, FTP, SMTP…
    - jiggawatts 2y ago
      > "So no, I don’t want my shell to also have to talk..." What's the point of the shell, if not to manage your databases, your REST APIs, files, and mail? Is it something you use for playing games on, or just for fun? > designed to do one thing well. Eeexcept that this is not actually true in practice, because the abstraction was set at a level that's too low. Shoving everything into a character (or byte) stream turned out to be a mistake. It means every "one thing" command is actually one thing plus a parser and and encoder. It means that "ps" has a built-in sort command, as do most other UNIX standard utilities, but they all do it differently. This also means that you just "need to know" how to convince each and every command to output machine-readable formats that other tools on the pipeline can pick up safely. I'll tell you a real troublshooting story, maybe that'll help paint a picture: I got called out to assist with an issue with a load balancer appliance used in front of a bunch of Linux servers. It was mostly working according to the customer, but their reporting tool was showing that it was sending traffic to the "wrong" services on each server. The monitoring tool used 'netstat' to track TCP connections, which had a bug in that version of RedHat where it would truncate the last decimal digit of the port number if the address:port combo had the maximum possible number of digits, e.g.: 123.123.123.123:54321 was shown as 123.123.123.123:5432 instead. Their tool was just ingesting that pretty printed table intended for humans with "aligned" columns, throwing away the whitespace, and putting that into a database! This gives me the icks, but apparently Just The Way Things Are Done in the UNIX world. In PowerShell, Get-NetTCPConnection outputs objects, so this kind of error is basically impossible. Downstream tools aren't parsing a text representation of a table or "splitting it into columns", they receive the data pre-parsed with native types and everything. So for example, this "just works": Get-NetTCPConnection | Where-Object State -EQ 'Bound' | Group-Object LocalPort -NoElement | Sort-Object Count -Descending -Top 10 Please show me the equivalent using netstat. In case the above was not readable for you, it shows the top ten TCP ports by how many bound connections they have. This kind of thing is a challenge with UNIX tools, and then is fragile forever. Any change to the output format of netstat breaks scripts in fun and create ways. Silently. In production. I hope you never have to deal with IPv6.
tomcam 2y ago
PowerShell can be embedded into a process as a library... and used to build an entire GUI that just wraps the CLI commands. Sounds pretty interesting. Can you tell me what search terms I'd use to learn more about the GUI controls? Are they portable to Linux?
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  It doesn’t have GUI capabilities per-se. Instead, it is designed to be easy to use as the foundation of an admin GUI. The .NET library for this is System.Management.Automation. You can call a PowerShell pipeline with one line of code: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.management.automation.powershell?view=powershellsdk-7.4.0 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.manageme... Unlike invoking bash (or whatever) as a process, this is much lighter weight and returns a sequence of objects with properties. You can trivially bind those to UI controls such as data tables. Similarly the virtual file system providers expose metadata programmatically such as “available operations”, all of which adhere to uniform interfaces. You can write a generic UI once for copy, paste, expand folder, etc and turn them on or off as needed to show only what’s available at each hierarchy level. As an example, the Citrix management consoles all work like this. Anything you can do in the GUI you can do in the CLI by definition because the GUI is just some widgets driving the same CLI code.
GuB-42 2y ago
I also hate bash scripting, and as far as Unix shell go, bash is among the best. So many footguns... Dealing with filenames with spaces is a pain, and files that start with a '-', "rm -rf" in a script is a disaster waiting to happen unless you triple check everything (empty strings, are you in the correct directory, etc...), globs that don't match anything, etc... But interactively, I much prefer Unix shells over PowerShell. When you don't have edge cases and user input validation to deal with, these quirks become much more manageable. Maybe I am lacking experience, but I find PowerShell uncomfortable to use, and I don't know if it has all these fancy interactive features many Unix shell have nowadays. What you are saying essentially is that PowerShell is a better programming language than bash, quite a low bar actually. But then you have to compare it to real programming languages, like Perl or Python. Perl has many shell-like features, the best regex support of any language, which is useful when everything is text, many powerful features, and an extensive ecosystem. Python is less shell-like but is one of the most popular languages today, with a huge ecosystem, clean code, and pretty good two-way integration, which mean you can not only run Python from your executable, but Python can call it back. If what you are for is portability and built-in commands, then the competition is Busybox, a ~1MB self-contained executable providing the most common Unix commands and a shell, very popular for embedded systems.
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  > What you are saying essentially is that PowerShell is a better programming language than bash In some sense, yes, but there is no distinct boundary. Or at least, there ought not to be one! A criticism a lot of people (including me) had of Windows in the NT4 and 2000 days was that there was an enormous gap between click-ops and heavyweight automation using C++ and COM objects (or even VBScript or VB6 for that matter). There wasn't an interactive shell that smoothly bridged these worlds. That's why many Linux users just assumed that Windows has no automation capability at all: They started with click-ops, never got past the gaping chasm, and just weren't aware that there was anything on the other side. There was, it just wasn't discoverable unless you were already an experienced developer. PowerShell bridges that gap, extending quite a bit in both directions. For example, I can use C# to write a PowerShell module that has the full power of a "proper" programming language, IDE with debug, etc... but still inherits the PS pipeline scaffolding so I don't have to reinvent the wheel for parameter parsing, tab-complete, output formatting, etc...
mixmastamyk 2y ago
Bash is crap and powershell an abomination with a few good ideas. fish, Python, and oilshell (ysh) are ultimately on better footing.
- anthk 2y ago
  Or just the old Perl. Any Bash/AWK/Sed user can be competent with it in days.

wruza 2y ago

My issue with powershell is that it’s niche language with a niche “stdlib” which cannot be used as general purpose. The same issue I have with AHK. These two are languages that you use for a few hours and then forget completely in three weeks. Both of them should be simply python and typescript compatible dlls. You can “cd” into IIS, Exchange, and SQL and navigate them like they’re a drive. Try that with bash! This exists.

teyc 2y ago

And for anyone who might be open to trying powershell, the cross platform version is pwsh. Pythonistas who are used to __dir__ and help() would find themselves comfortable with `gm` (get-member) and get-help to introspect commands. You will also find Python-style dynamic typing, except with PHP syntax. $a=1; $b=2; $a + $b works in a sane manner (try that with bash). There are still funny business with type coercion. $a=1; $b="2"; $a+$b (3); $b+$a ("21"); I also found "get-command" very helpful with locating related commands. For instance "get-command -noun file" returns all the "verb-noun" commands that has the noun "file". (It gives "out-file" and "unblock-file") Another nice thing about powershell is you can retain all your printf debugging when you are done. Using "Write-Verbose" and "Write-Debug" etc allows you to write at different log levels. Once you are used to basic powershell, there are bunch of standard patterns like how to do Dry-Runs, and Confirmation levels. Powershell also supports closures, so people create `make` style build systems and unit test suites with them.

ndsipa_pomu 2y ago

The big problem with trying to move on from BASH is that it's everywhere and is excellent at tying together other unix tools and navigating the filesystem - it's at just the right abstraction level to be the duct tape of languages. Moving to other languages provides a lot more safety and power, but then you can't rely on the correct version being necessarily installed on some machine you haven't touched in 10 years. I'm not a fan of powershell myself as the only time I've tried it (I don't do much with Windows), I hit a problem with it (or the object I was using) not being able to handle more than 256 characters for a directory and file. That meant that I just installed cygwin and used a BASH script instead.

richbell 2y ago

I am Microsoft hater. I cannot stand Windows and only use Linux. PowerShell blows bash out of the water. I love it.

sweeter 2y ago
except for the fact that it is slower than hell and the syntax is nuts. I don't really understand the comparison, bash is basically just command glue for composing pipelines and pwsh is definitely more of a full-fledged language... but to me, I use bash because its quick and dirty and it fits well with the Unix system. If I wanted the features that pwsh brings I would much rather just pick a language like Golang or Python where the experience is better and those things will work on any system imaginable. Whereas pwsh is really good on windows for specifically administrative tasks.
- hollerith 2y ago
  The fact that it is "basically just command glue for composing pipelines" makes it even more regrettable that it takes more knowledge and mental focus to avoid shooting my foot off in bash than it does in any other programming language I use.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    If you're trying to write a full fledged program in it, it's going to be a pain as there are only strings (and arrays, I think). Bash is for scripting. If you have complex logic to be done, use another programming language like perl, ruby, python, $YOUR_PREFERRED_ONE,...
    - jiggawatts 2y ago
      You’re arguing that the power of PowerShell is pointless because you’ve resorted to alternatives to bash… because it’s not good enough for common scenarios. This is Stockholm Syndrome. You’ve internalised your limitations and have grown to like them.

sgarland 2y ago

Bash also has a built-in to validate parameters; it’s called test, and is usually called with [], or [[]] for some bash-specifics. Re: non-standard tools, if you’re referring to timeout, that’s part of GNU coreutils. It’s pretty standard for Linux. BSDs also have it from what I can tell, so it’s probably a Mac-ism. In any case, you could just pipe through sleep to achieve the same thing. > …inputs and outputs are strongly typed objects And herein is the difference. *nix-land has everything as a file. It’s the universal communication standard, and it’s extremely unlikely to change. I have zero desire to navigate a DB as though it were a mount point, and I’m unsure why you would ever want to. Surely SQL Server has a CLI tool like MySQL and Postgres.

jiggawatts 2y ago
The CLI tool is PowerShell. You just said everything “is a file” and then dismissed out of hand a system that takes that abstraction even further! PowerShell is more UNIX than UNIX!
- sgarland 2y ago
  What? How are typed objects files? What I’m saying is that in *nix tooling, things are typically designed to do one thing well. So no, I don’t want my shell to also have to talk MySQL, Postgres, SQL Server, DB2, HTTP, FTP, SMTP…
  - jiggawatts 2y ago
    > "So no, I don’t want my shell to also have to talk..." What's the point of the shell, if not to manage your databases, your REST APIs, files, and mail? Is it something you use for playing games on, or just for fun? > designed to do one thing well. Eeexcept that this is not actually true in practice, because the abstraction was set at a level that's too low. Shoving everything into a character (or byte) stream turned out to be a mistake. It means every "one thing" command is actually one thing plus a parser and and encoder. It means that "ps" has a built-in sort command, as do most other UNIX standard utilities, but they all do it differently. This also means that you just "need to know" how to convince each and every command to output machine-readable formats that other tools on the pipeline can pick up safely. I'll tell you a real troublshooting story, maybe that'll help paint a picture: I got called out to assist with an issue with a load balancer appliance used in front of a bunch of Linux servers. It was mostly working according to the customer, but their reporting tool was showing that it was sending traffic to the "wrong" services on each server. The monitoring tool used 'netstat' to track TCP connections, which had a bug in that version of RedHat where it would truncate the last decimal digit of the port number if the address:port combo had the maximum possible number of digits, e.g.: 123.123.123.123:54321 was shown as 123.123.123.123:5432 instead. Their tool was just ingesting that pretty printed table intended for humans with "aligned" columns, throwing away the whitespace, and putting that into a database! This gives me the icks, but apparently Just The Way Things Are Done in the UNIX world. In PowerShell, Get-NetTCPConnection outputs objects, so this kind of error is basically impossible. Downstream tools aren't parsing a text representation of a table or "splitting it into columns", they receive the data pre-parsed with native types and everything. So for example, this "just works": Get-NetTCPConnection | Where-Object State -EQ 'Bound' | Group-Object LocalPort -NoElement | Sort-Object Count -Descending -Top 10 Please show me the equivalent using netstat. In case the above was not readable for you, it shows the top ten TCP ports by how many bound connections they have. This kind of thing is a challenge with UNIX tools, and then is fragile forever. Any change to the output format of netstat breaks scripts in fun and create ways. Silently. In production. I hope you never have to deal with IPv6.

tomcam 2y ago

PowerShell can be embedded into a process as a library... and used to build an entire GUI that just wraps the CLI commands. Sounds pretty interesting. Can you tell me what search terms I'd use to learn more about the GUI controls? Are they portable to Linux?

jiggawatts 2y ago
It doesn’t have GUI capabilities per-se. Instead, it is designed to be easy to use as the foundation of an admin GUI. The .NET library for this is System.Management.Automation. You can call a PowerShell pipeline with one line of code: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.management.automation.powershell?view=powershellsdk-7.4.0 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.manageme... Unlike invoking bash (or whatever) as a process, this is much lighter weight and returns a sequence of objects with properties. You can trivially bind those to UI controls such as data tables. Similarly the virtual file system providers expose metadata programmatically such as “available operations”, all of which adhere to uniform interfaces. You can write a generic UI once for copy, paste, expand folder, etc and turn them on or off as needed to show only what’s available at each hierarchy level. As an example, the Citrix management consoles all work like this. Anything you can do in the GUI you can do in the CLI by definition because the GUI is just some widgets driving the same CLI code.

GuB-42 2y ago

I also hate bash scripting, and as far as Unix shell go, bash is among the best. So many footguns... Dealing with filenames with spaces is a pain, and files that start with a '-', "rm -rf" in a script is a disaster waiting to happen unless you triple check everything (empty strings, are you in the correct directory, etc...), globs that don't match anything, etc... But interactively, I much prefer Unix shells over PowerShell. When you don't have edge cases and user input validation to deal with, these quirks become much more manageable. Maybe I am lacking experience, but I find PowerShell uncomfortable to use, and I don't know if it has all these fancy interactive features many Unix shell have nowadays. What you are saying essentially is that PowerShell is a better programming language than bash, quite a low bar actually. But then you have to compare it to real programming languages, like Perl or Python. Perl has many shell-like features, the best regex support of any language, which is useful when everything is text, many powerful features, and an extensive ecosystem. Python is less shell-like but is one of the most popular languages today, with a huge ecosystem, clean code, and pretty good two-way integration, which mean you can not only run Python from your executable, but Python can call it back. If what you are for is portability and built-in commands, then the competition is Busybox, a ~1MB self-contained executable providing the most common Unix commands and a shell, very popular for embedded systems.

jiggawatts 2y ago
> What you are saying essentially is that PowerShell is a better programming language than bash In some sense, yes, but there is no distinct boundary. Or at least, there ought not to be one! A criticism a lot of people (including me) had of Windows in the NT4 and 2000 days was that there was an enormous gap between click-ops and heavyweight automation using C++ and COM objects (or even VBScript or VB6 for that matter). There wasn't an interactive shell that smoothly bridged these worlds. That's why many Linux users just assumed that Windows has no automation capability at all: They started with click-ops, never got past the gaping chasm, and just weren't aware that there was anything on the other side. There was, it just wasn't discoverable unless you were already an experienced developer. PowerShell bridges that gap, extending quite a bit in both directions. For example, I can use C# to write a PowerShell module that has the full power of a "proper" programming language, IDE with debug, etc... but still inherits the PS pipeline scaffolding so I don't have to reinvent the wheel for parameter parsing, tab-complete, output formatting, etc...

mixmastamyk 2y ago

Bash is crap and powershell an abomination with a few good ideas. fish, Python, and oilshell (ysh) are ultimately on better footing.

anthk 2y ago
Or just the old Perl. Any Bash/AWK/Sed user can be competent with it in days.