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Why Microsoft open sourced PowerShell and ported it to Linux (www.cio.com)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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In the comments section of a recent post I found out that Windows PowerShell had been ported to Linux. Had no clue it was a thing.

Went looking and found this old article attempting to explain why they did it. Not remotely interested in giving up Bash for PowerShell, but I thought it was interesting enough to share. The article seems to be from 2016.

I have never been more tempted to check the NSFW box, but I'll leave it open for now unless a mod complains. :-D

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (3 children)

bash scripting is not intended to perform all of your logic in the scripting language, it's intended to call out to other programs which perform specific tasks. The entire POSIX command set is your bash scripting language.

Your script is a simple one-liner if you know some simple commands:

$ head -n 1 /usr/share/dict/words | tee /dev/stderr | tr -d '\n' | wc -c
A
1

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Bash one liners are one is the most fun things in programming.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

bash scripting is not intended to perform all of your logic in the scripting language

Maybe not all, but it's definitely intended to do some, and it's really bad at it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It works fine for what it is. Bash is just a shell while Powershell is more of a scripting language.

I think a better comparison would be Python vs Powershell.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

It doesn't work fine for what it is. People use Bash for scripting all the time and it's full of footguns and gotchas. Powershell is just an attempt at a sane shell. It's not meant to be a full general purpose language like Python; it doesn't make sense to equate them.

Personally I don't really like the style of Powershell. The structured data is very obviously a good thing but I don't really like the syntax. Nushell seems a lot nicer IMO.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I can do that as well:

$l = Get-Content "example.txt" -TotalCount 1; Write-Output $l; ($l.TrimEnd("`r", "`n")).Length

There's a condensed version using aliases then:

$l = gc 'example.txt' -TotalCount 1; $l; ($l.TrimEnd("`r", "`n")).Length

I still think it has a better syntax than bash.