Two Months with Powershell on a Unix (opens in new tab)

My biggest issue with powershell is how undiscoverable it is. Good luck doing anything without searching for commands in a web browser.

But maybe that's just a result if it being so new. 'ls' has been around for almost 50 years...

What it really feels like is a complete programming language inside of notepad.exe because of the historically terrible windows command prompt.

Hey, I use PowerShell on Windows a lot. Some advice that I hope helps for installing posh-got specifically is to “git clone” the posh-git repo. Then in your $Profile.CurrentUserAllHosts do an Import-Module for the PSM.

I know all this is personal and subjective. I think using git to manage this is pretty easy and safe. If and when I want to update it’s as simple as doing a git pull in my local repo of posh-git and reloading the shell.

If the new version is broken (has never happened yet but ya know.. in case) just checkout the previous one.

I have found using git, the powershell user profile and modifying my user path when necessary is the best way of managing dev dependencies on Windows.

I also understand why people want this all abstracted away from them in a package manager.

I've done quite a bit of powershell scripting, and it has some warts but overall it's actually pretty good.

  * You have access to the entire .Net standard library
  * Optional typing
  * Writing functions and using pipes allows a functional style
  * You can even inline some C# code, or read it from a separate file and compile it on the fly. I've used that to make windows API calls (P/Invoke).

Overall, I'd choose pwsh scripting over bash any day, and I'd say it doesn't even make me miss python all that much (for simple scripts, couple hundred lines max).

The main feature lacking for larger scripts/tools is classes, I think. Unless it has changed in newer versions, powershell is object-oriented yet does not allow you to define custom classes, which is annoying to say the least. The workaround is loading c# on the fly.

> - As a scripting language, I’m going to use Python or Go the moment anything becomes larger than a few lines,

The point is very much that with powershell this move is to C#, with a much nicer integration with the shell.

For scripting, if you use Python and Go, give Nim a try.

yeah I use to automate a decent amount of stuff for bigger deployments for client with it as it’s easier to pass through security audit then an executable.

I always feel like things in power shell are harder then they need to be that other scripting languages I don’t have that problem. One thing I do like is being able to leverage .net locally and also import DLLs. That helps me get around a bunch of gaps.

I’m not sure I could cope with that. I have enough problems with it on windows. Literally every corner you turn something punches you in the balls or turns to dust in your hands. It’s one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever used and I avoid it where I can.

I would not invite it onto a *nix machine voluntarily where there are established patterns and solutions which have matured over the space of 40 odd years now.

I use powershell on linux occasionally. Primarily with the azure and powercli modules. For doing vmware and azure stuff I can't think of anything that hasn't worked.

If you want to do anything that would be windows only then you're right, it probably won't work.

That said, I usually have a tmux window ssh'd into a windows machine for powershell. It would be nice to be able to manage ad and exchange from a linux machine with powershell.

Invoke-WebRequest most certainly runs on linux.

Same here. I love using pwsh 7 on windows, but on Linux it was a whole different experience. Granted I was trying to use it on an Arch instance, which isn't technically supported, but I couldn't even get PSGet or PsReadLine to work. However, I was pretty great to run the same scripts cross OS with basic commands like Invoke-WebMethod/Invoke-RestMethod

Invoke-WebRequest doesn't even work correctly on windows for a large amount of very vanilla web functionality.

Powershell is a nice idea, but Microsoft is kidding themselves if they think it's even close to the alternatives.

I don't know what your native language is, but in English "pester" means to annoy. A negative connotation no matter what.

I don't get the hate on Bash though. It's a natural extension of the command line, and works quite nicely to get a lot done without the overhead. Deployment is a lot easier in my environment (web hosting) because all of the servers are homogenous, and I don't need to worry about any dependencies because I rely mostly on coreutils + grep and awk.

why can't the two coexist? On Linux you can currently choose rather easily between bash, fish, zsh, ash, dash, sh, ksh, csh, tcsh, fish and more. Every script can use the one it wants easily with `#!/usr/bin/env <shell>`

If you're arguing that powershell should be the default that's a different argument. sh syntax is still in widespread use because of how portable it is and how widely known it is. It truly is the lingua franca of unixey OSes.

No one should script for bash or PowerShell for that matter.

If you have to write shell scripts on Linux then target #!/bin/sh and write it so that it works in other shells.

The problem with Powershell for scripting is that it is just good enough that people don't go use something better like Python or Ruby.

Powershell is kind of half baked. In Powershell you mostly interact with in a functional manner (chaining, filtering, etc) but Powershell for whatever reason provides nearly zero functional programming features which makes it painful to script in. IMO anyways

powershell is ok, I guess, but the core issue is it's over-engineered.

Bash is weird, but it is everywhere and it's simple, and that simplicity is going the be very difficult to replace. How do replace nothing?

I love Python, do switch to it.

( The windows and MS stack is utter balls )

>Powershell is very command-line friendly, with easy tab-completion of commands

I really couldn't agree less. Title-Case with hyphens and verbose command names make it horrible just to type. The only reason I see for doing that is so that it would fit in with the rest of the ecosystem.

Maybe it's a nice scripting language: we already have quite a lot of nice scripting languages.

> I am dead serious. Powershell should replace (bash) shell scripting under any Linux.

This probably means you don't have a CS background and/or very little experience with linux/scripting/etc and dare I say powershell itself. Scripting in linux/unix/etc is primarily text based whereas powershell is object based ( which is why powershell tends to be slow in comparison ). Also, the only thing going for powershell is it's tie-in with the .Net Framework along with Microsoft based servers ( such as SQL Server ). Like most Microsoft products, it's meant for their environment. There really isn't any real reason for powershell on linux.

> I find shell scripts terrible, I've learned to switch to Python quickly, despite the overhead. Powershell is very command-line friendly, with easy tab-completion of commands. I've worked with it extensively on Windows, creating large worklflows with it, it's very nice.

Sounds about right. I can't believe that's what you wrote in support of powershell. Linux, bash, etc was built from the ground up to be command-line friendly. Windows was built to be GUI friendly. But there is a reason why windows administration is viewed as a joke in the tech industry. I guess powershell may seems amazing when going from GUI based administration to actual script based automation/administration.

> Powershell even has a unit test tool called 'pester' which is funny to me because it means 'bully' in my native language.

Yeah, it means bother/annoy in english, but you probably knew that already.

I was just thinking "could this be it? Another Microsoft product that I start voluntarily using? (besides VSCode)" and then I go to the comments and the first comment I see reveals the Microsoft stink.

A shell with telemetry. Insane.

NixOS already did this at https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/74516

How often do you need to reapply this?

The echo problem is reflective of a larger, longer-term issue with PowerShell, that being that it sometimes aliases PowerShell commands to the names of equivalent Unix commands. That’s done to ease the transition into PS-land for Unix folks, of course. But unless the PowerShell command works exactly the same as the Unix command it’s aliased to — takes all the same arguments, returns all the same data structures and error codes, etc. — you inevitably run into cases where things break because echo or curl or whatever aren’t behaving the way your code expects them to.

A) this is all good stuff, I want to get better with powershell in 2020 and just learned some things here B) I think the authors point was that a lot of their googling for how to do things in a shell assume posix shell. So copy paste from web doesn’t work as well for powershell, which becomes frustrating for new onboarders.

> You could do that, but the way to write it in the bash way would be `dir | select -first 3`

I would have said "ls | head -n3" as well. I've never heard of "select". I just tried your suggestion and it doesn't appear to work:

    $ dir | select -first 3
    bash: syntax error near unexpected token `3'

>You could do that, but the way to write it in the bash way would be `dir | select -first 3`

Fyi, `dir | select -first 3` also works in PowerShell.

Hey thanks for this, nushell looks really interesting! I really like the idea of an objective shell but don't like the verbosity of PowerShell inputs. I think if you go through my post history I actually describe wanting something like Nushell, not knowing it existed!

Just a tip. If you want something like sudo, install gsudo (choco install gsudo). It works like sudo: no new shell, don’t need to use “”.

Another shell that has a similar philosophy is Nu[1]. I think the idea of structured shells (and typed shells?) is a very interesting path to improve UX and prevent certain kinds of common error.

[1]: https://github.com/nushell/nushell

My new favorite recipient of objects is Out-ConsoleGridView (along with the normal gridview).

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/powershell/introducing-consol...

It looks like an overhead, but when needed, boy is it a bliss to use.

That is unlikely to happen in PowerShell because the structured data is .Net objects. If you are writing a C# cmdlet, it runs in the PowerShell executable process. That is, the output is not structured text it's live state, open file handles, methods, in-memory structures, whatever you want. You aren't going to do that from a native command running in a separate process returning data through stdout without serializing it - and then you're back to convertfrom-json as far as it matters.

> For these structured shells(like Powershell, elvish, Nushell) to succeed, they should...

For PowerShell to succeed, Microsoft should rewrite all the GNU coreutils? Did you see the months of outcry when Microsoft used the four characters "curl" in PowerShell? You reckon anyone is going to want unilaterally rewritten coreutils? From Microsoft?

Microsoft should stop on their development of a completely new tool and hobble themselves to the constraints of the stuff they're trying to replace, controlled by people they're in competition with? Unlikely fantasy world.

It's not madness, it's the price of flexibility and one that I am personally gladly to pay. I am forced to use Windows and pre-approved tooling daily at work, you can't imagine what a relief it is to use Linux at home, where you can chain together the exact programs that you want and make them work the way you want.

There are often more costs in sticking with the same tech for forty years...I would still be coding for DOS...I hope with new generations of devs will come better tools...as well as a greater willingness to move on...

>Hmm, yes, but it's not a lazy array/list, so it's not online, is it. If you have a few million files in a directory, that's not going to work.

It is lazy. The author slightly misunderstood / oversimplified what's going on. The commandlet does not build an entire array in memory and then write it out; it writes out each item one at a time. Evaluating it as `$(dir)` just forces all its output to be collected into a single value, ie an array. It's the equivalent of writing `output="$(ls)"; <<< $output head -n3` in bash.

I posted an alternative way to write this in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22963842 which does not need to build the output as an array first and is also more natural to write.

This is the exactly the type of comment I came here for, thanks!

Given that example, good luck trying to log into a DataCenter that still uses classical UNIX with either sh or ksh as their only options.

Bash also has not replaced all other UNIX shells.