PowerShell Is Surprisingly Good, Even on a Mac
I can't believe PowerShell is good
After years of ignoring PowerShell, the author finally tried it for a Windows project and kept using it on macOS. PowerShell 7 is cross-platform, object-oriented, and ships with built-in cmdlets for JSON, web requests, and even the Windows Registry as a virtual drive. It replaces the boilerplate of Bash scripts and the dependency headaches of Node.js for everyday automation.
PowerShell is great, even if you don't use it as your shell, and even if you're on Mac or Linux.
- 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 […]
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.