Ask HN: Are there no shells for Windows other than PowerShell and CMD? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Are there no shells for Windows other than PowerShell and CMD?

#21

Post by pixl97 » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 3:34 PM UTC

delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #10

Why not PowerShell, though? If you ever want to directly administer Windows through the command-line, PowerShell is increasingly your only bet, as older CMD executables are deprecated. I'll suffix with my opinion that PowerShell is much nicer than many POSIX shells, especially given its hybrid object-oriented + functional pipeline paradigm.

And following on this, for the longest time Windows only had extremely limited ability to manage itself via the command line and things were very haphazard on how you could manage them on the CLI. You were probably just using the CLI to edit the registry and restart serivces/executables at the best case.

This is really the reason there are no shells for windows. There wasn't anything for the shell to do! No massive collection of small executables linux *nix that were shell oriented. No system design around CLI management.

Around Windows 2016 or so I would say this changed with Powershell and with a number of design changes by Microsoft that allowed much better remote management (and not fully depending on GPO to do it), and I even run into some customers that have headless windows servers these days.

Re: Ask HN: Are there no shells for Windows other than PowerShell and CMD?

#22

Post by pixl97 » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 3:40 PM UTC

Kukumber wrote: post #19

naikrovek wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a shell is what you type your commands into. a shell interprets those commands, pipes between them, and to and from file handles, and acts as the interface between the human and the things they want to do. bash is FAR slower than PowerShell, and it's interpreted.

> bash is FAR slower than PowerShell, and it's interpreted. That's not true at all I have a demonstration that's very telling: time pwsh time bash Post your result It's sad that nowadays people do not understand the purpose of a shell

This really sounds like shell gatekeeping touching on the no true Scotsman fallacy.

The purpose of the shell, to me, is to

1. Remote management/system administration. 2. Application execution 3. Data modification in situ

And powershell does all 3 for me.

Lastly just typing bash/pwsh is a useless benchmark as I can make both run at wildly different speeds (bash .profile modification and pwsh -noprofile loading)

Re: Ask HN: Are there no shells for Windows other than PowerShell and CMD?

#23

Post by Kukumber » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 4:17 PM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #22

Kukumber wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> bash is FAR slower than PowerShell, and it's interpreted. That's not true at all I have a demonstration that's very telling: time pwsh time bash Post your result It's sad that nowadays people do not understand the purpose of a shell

This really sounds like shell gatekeeping touching on the no true Scotsman fallacy. The purpose of the shell, to me, is to 1. Remote management/system administration. 2. Application execution 3. Data modification in situ And powershell does all 3 for me. Lastly just typing bash/pwsh is a useless benchmark as I can make both run at wildly different speeds (bash .profile modification and pwsh -noprofile loading)

I never said you should not use it, i'm not gatekeeping

I only state a fact, you pick what you want that empowers you to do great things

But i'm not going to ignore wrong claims, it lowers the standard of quality we should expect from the tools we create, share and use