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In defense of PowerShell

benwilson.me

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Re: In defense of PowerShell

#11

Post by parfe »

I dislike windows (and by extension, powershell) because a solution such as changing the port the webserver runs on looks something like:

    New-ItemProperty IIS:\sites\DemoSite -name bindings -value @{protocol="http";bindingInformation=":8081:"}
http://www.iis.net/learn/manage/powershell/powershell-snap-i...

What did I just modify? Is it persisted to the hard disk? How do i back that up? How do I revert the change? How do I move this change (and 20 others) from one server to another? It's three months later, and I want to do something similar, where can I find the current state of DemoSite and mimic it for DevSite?

I like plain text. Clearly companies succeed on microsoft products and people make money administering them. Doesn't mean I have to like it.

Re: In defense of PowerShell

#12

Post by wvenable »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #6

> I’m willing to admit that PowerShell isn’t obviously better as a shell than something like bash, but it’s unquestionably a better language to use for scripting. There's a missing "on Windows" here. Sure, PowerShell is clearly a tool designed for the Windows environment. And if you're a Windows system administrator, it has more tools and glue for that environment. You could use PowerShell to replace things that you'…

If you take away the platform and command differences, then Bash is a worse scripting language than Powershell. Bash is a rough programming language to work in.

This whole comment about "on Windows" is completely beside the point. And the impedance mismatch, as you said, was already commented about in the article.

Re: In defense of PowerShell

#14

Post by switch007 »

parfe wrote: post #11

I dislike windows (and by extension, powershell) because a solution such as changing the port the webserver runs on looks something like: New-ItemProperty IIS:\sites\DemoSite -name bindings -value @{protocol="http";bindingInformation=":8081:"} http://www.iis.net/learn/manage/powershell/powershell-snap-i... What did I just modify? Is it persisted to the hard disk? How do i back that up? How do I revert the change? How…

Why the colons surrounding the port !?

Re: In defense of PowerShell

#15

Post by nailer »

julianz wrote: post #7

I work primarily in a Microsoft environment, although I have Linux shell experience as well, and I totally don't get Powershell. What is a cmdlet? Why does it need a stupid made-up name like that? Why are all the commands incredibly verbose and hard to remember? I avoid using it at every opportunity.

As a Unix person, 'Restart-Service' seems a lot easier to remember than 'systemctl'.

Edit: Restart-Service is also easier to remember than /etc/init.d was.

Edit 2 (rate limit): `service` on RHEL is great, but it's a Red Hat-ism. Which is fine, I used to work at Red Hat, but still.

It's also pretty limited: you use service to start/stop/restart, but you still use systemctl to list services, or list /etc/init.d (technically /etc/rc.d/init.d on RHEL) on older boxes.

On Windows, to get services, it's `get-service`

Fun exercise for readers, given that you now know `restart-service` and `get-service`:

- Guess what the powershell command to get processes is.

- Guess what the powershell command to stop a process is.

- Guess what the Powershell command to install a package is.

There's some weird ones - dmidecode on Linux becomes get-wmiobject on Powershell (see the rosetta stone link posted earlier) - but for the most part it makes more sense than Linux and Unix.

Re: In defense of PowerShell

#17

Post by vezzy-fnord »

nailer wrote: post #15
julianz wrote: post #7

I work primarily in a Microsoft environment, although I have Linux shell experience as well, and I totally don't get Powershell. What is a cmdlet? Why does it need a stupid made-up name like that? Why are all the commands incredibly verbose and hard to remember? I avoid using it at every opportunity.

As a Unix person, 'Restart-Service' seems a lot easier to remember than 'systemctl'. Edit: Restart-Service is also easier to remember than /etc/init.d was. Edit 2 (rate limit): `service` on RHEL is great, but it's a Red Hat-ism. Which is fine, I used to work at Red Hat, but still. It's also pretty limited: you use service to start/stop/restart, but you still use systemctl to list services, or list /etc/init.d (techni…

It's not like 'systemctl' is the only game in town, though.

Re: In defense of PowerShell

#18

Post by nailer »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #6

> I’m willing to admit that PowerShell isn’t obviously better as a shell than something like bash, but it’s unquestionably a better language to use for scripting. There's a missing "on Windows" here. Sure, PowerShell is clearly a tool designed for the Windows environment. And if you're a Windows system administrator, it has more tools and glue for that environment. You could use PowerShell to replace things that you'…

> There's a missing "on Windows" here.

A Powershell object piping system would be great on Unix too. Scraping text is fragile and slow.

Obviously for a Unix port you wouldn't write cmdlets in .net like Powershell but something popular in the Linux/Unix admin world, most likely Python.

Re: In defense of PowerShell

#19

Post by tokenizerrr »

nailer wrote: post #15
julianz wrote: post #7

I work primarily in a Microsoft environment, although I have Linux shell experience as well, and I totally don't get Powershell. What is a cmdlet? Why does it need a stupid made-up name like that? Why are all the commands incredibly verbose and hard to remember? I avoid using it at every opportunity.

As a Unix person, 'Restart-Service' seems a lot easier to remember than 'systemctl'. Edit: Restart-Service is also easier to remember than /etc/init.d was. Edit 2 (rate limit): `service` on RHEL is great, but it's a Red Hat-ism. Which is fine, I used to work at Red Hat, but still. It's also pretty limited: you use service to start/stop/restart, but you still use systemctl to list services, or list /etc/init.d (techni…

What about service apache2 restart

Re: In defense of PowerShell

#20

Post by Raesan »

bashinator wrote: post #3

The tab completion in powershell is frustrating to me. I never want to cycle through every available option (especially when many PSH commands have literally hundreds of switches). I want the tab-completion to only show options for which I've started typing the prefix. I want double-tab to print a listing of said options so that I can see them all at once. Is this possible? Right now it feels like there's a major lac…

Yeah, that really bothered me coming from bash. I agree it's not as good from a discoverability perspective. Having said that, it's not the kind of thing that has continued to bother me over time. I've gotten used to it.
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