I can't believe PowerShell is good

ruined

unlike macos's curl, powershell's curl alias for Invoke-WebRequest checks the revoke list and will protect you from mitmproxy --emudhra

3eb7988a1663

I have only ever used Powershell when I had no other options, but a decent number of the APIs feel designed by someone who has never used a terminal. Like they were begrudgingly fulfilling the objective without ever imagining a real use-case. Naturally, I cannot produce an example off hand, but I was pretty disappointed the last time I had to reach for it and found that a few "obvious" workflows seemed more hacky than I would have expected for a clean-slate terminal language design.

SBArbeit

Part of setting up a new Windows or Linux machine for me is installing the latest PowerShell 7+. My $PROFILE has custom modules that comprise ~9,000 lines of PowerShell. Anything "script-y" that I think I'll do more than a few times becomes a new function in one of those modules. On Windows, I haven't used `cmd.exe` in at least a decade. And part of my root `AGENTS.md` is "Please use PowerShell when generating scripts, unless I specifically ask for a different language." Works a treat. Once you get used to passing objects between commands - not just text - the thought of using a Unix-y shell feels like visiting the past.

xp84

I have to admit it's better than scripting in Bash, but in my personal opinion that's a bar so low it's on the ground. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful that shell scripting is a thing. But my policy for a decade has been that when I need any logic more complex than a simple string matching in an `if`, I should back away from the computer and then rewrite it in a reasonable scripting language. Powershell is definitely a reasonable scripting language; it's mainly its verbose command names and new-to-me syntax that have made me put off learning it so far. I suspect that it looks more familiar and welcoming to .NET devs though.

holysoles

I've written a lot of powershell in my time.. PS is really powerful for Windows OS level concepts and enterprise software that have good modules (AD, IIS, Citrix). However it has so many semantics that can burn you; non-strict mode, implicit type conversion, ordered null checks [1], not to mention the amount of boilerplate in a module and the runtime overhead. At a certain scale/complexity you need to graduate to using C# and .NET. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/utility-modules...

d3Xt3r

Windows sysadmin here. PowerShell has been great for a long time, well, since at least v5.1, when they finally fixed many of the annoying issues and limitations of earlier versions. I practically live in it the whole day - 90%+ of my work life is in PowerShell these days. But I question its utility on other platforms, because a lot of the things that makes PowerShell cool on Windows doesn't actually work in Linux or macOS. Eg: Get-Service (and associated cmdlets). Very handy cmdlet that I use all the time on Windows. On Linux, you'd expect that it'd work with systemd units, but no, that command doesn't exist on the Linux version. Same with Get-NetAdapter, or Get-NetTCPConnection, or Get-Disk and so many other handy cmdlets that I use all the time on Windows, are all missing. Yet, some cmdlets do exist, like Get-Process or Get-Uptime etc, so I don't understand why many of the commonly used Windows cmdlets haven't been ported over. Another annoying quirk is how PowerShell on *nix hands off some of the built-in aliases to their native versions. Like on Windows, I always use 'ls' because ain't nobody got time to type Get-ChildItem. Unfortunately when I run this on *nix PS, it runs the native version. And this is a problem because when I pipe 'ls' into a for loop or another cmdlet for further processing, it naturally, doesn't work. To make things worse, this native-or-alias decision making isn't even consistent. Like 'pwd' for example actually runs the PowerShell version, whereas 'echo' runs the native version. Basically, as much as I love PowerShell on Windows, on *nix it is very annoying to work with. I would much rather work with native *nix shells and scripting languages. And if I really wanted the structured output of PS, I would run Nushell instead, which is far more consistent and useful than the half-baked product that *nix PowerShell is.

nonameiguess

Yeah, you're not the first to discover this, but I'm curious how you'll feel in a few years. I recall three years ago my wife got a new gamer laptop and had nothing to do with her old one. I don't game, but got curious about playing around with Hyper-V. Packer at the time had no working builder for it, so I figured I'd make my own to create Linux VM images I could run on Windows, sort of "roll your own WSL." I quickly discovered PowerShell and unexpectedly fell in love with it. It only took me a few hours to have a working implementation roughly identical in function to Packer but without having to write any compiled code at all. It was pure PowerShell modules. This was before LLMs. I wrote it all myself, in a language I'd never used before, using documentation I had to search the web for using a plain search engine, and it still only took a few hours and did exactly what I wanted. It didn't revolutionize my life, though. Three years later, I no longer use Windows for anything and revert to plain POSIX shell whenever possible for all scripting, largely for ecosystem reasons. Everyone else I work with is using that. I'd analogize this to challenges living downtown in the middle of a busy city. My roads are terrible, largely because they're so patchwork due to utilities and construction teams needing to tear out pieces, fix or add something underground to accomodate new building, then put the road back together again. It means you'll have 30 meters of regular concrete, then 10 meters of asphalt, then 20 meters of some pebbles in glue looking monstrosity. It works well enough for cars with large rubber tires and suspension systems, but it's hell for skateboarding. Go out to the suburbs where the entire road is all the same substance and it's smooth sailing. Hacker News and the web more generally seems like these discussions about tooling and dev experience end up dominated by solo developers. If you're the only person working on a project, let alone these days with LLMs where half the breathless posts are about software where you're not only the sole developer but also the sole user, do whatever you want. It's like moving all the furniture around in your room every single day when you live alone. Go for it. But if you have a spouse, whether or not your new design is better than the old one, that's kind of rude. When you're part of a team, you have to eventually settle on all doing roughly similar, predictable things so you're not disrupting everyone else's workflows and expectations, even if those roughly similar, predictable things are suboptimal and there's a better way.

stephbook

PowerShell is nice. It also reads well. What does sed, tar xvf, jq curl -k actually _do_? And then passing text lines with > like a caveman. Does bash not have the concept of objects? You write Invoke-WebRequest and it invokes a web request. Easy.

majkinetor

Powershell is so good that I find it strange it didn't get to be default at least in some Linux distributins (or some proper fork/redo of it). I even used it for integrative feautures for some of my state projects serving millions of user. The fact that I have proper language, designed for shell, very efficient, not needing an IDE or anything, is quite liberating. I use it for all kinds of stuff. Here is an example that creates MusicBrainz collection from my local audio folder, solving the browsers proof of work in between: https://github.com/majkinetor/musicbrainz-userscripts/tree/m... If I am nitpicking, performance could be better, although MS did a lot in previous years and even that just in theory as I was never really blocked by that. But if it could be performance beast too, I would think we can stop researching new shells and just use it everyhwhere. JSON support is amazing - you don't learn anything new like with jq, it just works. Selecting stuff is amazing, I love it more then SQL. HashTables are epic for configuration (you have a real language in it, unlike in lets say YAML). Scripts that look horrible in bash are few lines of beautiful in pwsh. If you didn't try it, or didn't give it a chance, you are missing out for sure.

IronWolve

Been using oh-my-posh in powershell, and some aliases to map commands for my old linux sysadmin brain. Everything mostly works to get the job done, even got vi and scp. Its just another tab in my windows terminal with my ubuntu tabs.

Panzerschrek

Does it have automatic error handling, so that if one command fails, the whole script fails too? Last time I tried it, I needed to write if ($LastExitCode -ne 0) after each command.

Schlagbohrer

I recently installed Powershell 7 because apparently that is different than the powershell that comes with windows. It's great, but, now I have at least 3 different Powershells in my OS? Why? And they function very differently. I had to change all the defaults for opening a new terminal or new shell window in Windows because many of the defaults kept giving me one of the old powershells which I wouldnt figure out until my commands and scripts kept giving errors, since they use commands which only exist in Powershell 7. Cannot believe Microsoft decided to copy Python's original sin and create several conflicting, coexisting installations of the exact same thing, but different incompatible versions. Whyyyyyyyy Regarding the article: Corbin Davenport is an amazing name. Nice article too.

16bitvoid

I personally prefer nushell[0] over PowerShell for similar tasks. My main is still Fish, but I occasionally use nushell when interactively exploring structured data (e.g. JSON files because I always forget the jq syntax) and specific nushell scripts I have (e.g. finding all the available nodes with GPUs on a SLURM managed HPC printed as a pretty table), which I find much easier to write than bash/fish. 0: https://www.nushell.sh/