Powershell

Powershell

Windows Powershell is a shell / scripting environment created by Microsoft. You can read more about the technical stuff here.

Rationale

I think Powershell is pretty neat. I used Linux as my main OS for about 5 years and had to switch to Windows very recently for a myriad of reasons. Ironically I might have to switch back soon (taking a *NIX Systems Programming class), but in the meantime I wanted a scripting language for Windows that was better for the everyday grind than Python, so I did some research and found Powershell. Its no bash, but its close, and I think if it was embraced by the world and the Internet (re: people give M$ a reason to care about it) then it could be really great. The fact that Microsoft is actively trying to make Windows a more dev-friendly environment shows that exciting things are happening (See: SSH on Windows), and I believe those changes will start begin with the upcoming changes to Powershell in Windows 10.

- Anon, June 9th 2015

Getting Started =

Here is a chart that I made. (I made it as a .pdf because I can't be assed to learn how to use WikiMedia properly, so if you don't like that please contribute yourself.) It was designed to get someone familiar with the *NIX shell up and scripting as fast as possible, and includes all the common commands I remember using often on *NIX.

Let's do a quick analysis of this chart and come up with some pros and cons.

Pros of Powershell:

• Syntax is sometimes much clearer than bash. Powershell's syntax is also much more consistent. This makes it much easier to compose and read scripts.
• Syntax is generally not case sensitive. Some people might put this as a con but I like it and I think many others do too.
• Familiar conventions to get *NIX people started, such as $ for variables, cp, mv, mkdir, etc.
• Familiar object-oriented conventions are baked in. If you come from a Java, C#, or even Ruby background, lots of things should feel familiar.
• Decently fast, both performance-wise and to learn.
• .NET environment, meaning its extensible with your own .NET objects.
• Lots of juicy default aliases for juicy shortcuts. You can tell whoever wrote this shit actually uses a shell.
• Access to lots of Windows APIs/features such as the registry and Internet Explorer.
• Powershell Community Extensions and/or PsGet.
• Its not cmd.exe ! ! !

Cons of Powershell:

• Windows only, whereas bash or sh is on basically every OS (including Windows with Cygwin).
• Cannot run scripts by default, and Powershell only comes by default with Win7 and up. Makes scripts unportable because they are not really guarunteed to run on another machine.
• Sometimes the commands are quite verbose. It can be especially annoying to type out very verbose arguments, such as '-Recurse' as opposed to '-r'.
• Fairly slow autocomplete (hopefully will be fixed in Windows 10).
• No reverse i-search by default.
• Capitals everywhere. Why? I know it usually doesn't matter but its still kind of ugly.
• Binary logs (Get-History is an example, I think).