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A Saner Windows Command Line

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Re: A Saner Windows Command Line

#11

Post by kelvin0 »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #5

Powershell and its long winded cmdlets are really hard for me to like. I always fall back to cygwin on windows. I once wrote a PS script to set some power management options on a corporate laptop. The script was 11 lines long (vs 3 lines in Python), it was harder to read and understand. Even with ISE available it was much harder to write. I followed along with some exchange server tutorial where the prescribed easy w…

I made a big push at some point to start using Powershell instead of the horrible .bat files I had written at some point (and their arcane unreadable commands). But Powershell's syntax, convoluted names and the unreadable code we had to write to do simple things really made me reconsider seriously. I simply use Python for these things (99% time it has all I need).

Re: A Saner Windows Command Line

#12

Post by UK-AL »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #5

Powershell and its long winded cmdlets are really hard for me to like. I always fall back to cygwin on windows. I once wrote a PS script to set some power management options on a corporate laptop. The script was 11 lines long (vs 3 lines in Python), it was harder to read and understand. Even with ISE available it was much harder to write. I followed along with some exchange server tutorial where the prescribed easy w…

Without seeing the script, it's hard to make judgement. Powershell has a ton of alias(Use Get-Alias to find them) and shortcuts, but most people don't use them.

Re: A Saner Windows Command Line

#13

Post by agumonkey »

sz4kerto wrote: post #9
SeanDav wrote: post #6

> "And, purely subjectively, I think the .ps1 syntax is a lot more readable than the old .bat syntax." The Author does say "subjectively" but in my experience, both personally and with others, the reverse is true. Powershell can seem to be really cryptic.

Bash can be _extremely_ cryptic as well, we just learned it over time. Look at awk :)

then perl, then python, then bash.

Re: A Saner Windows Command Line

#14

Post by hobs »

I think a lot of the hate on powershell is that it chooses to do things very similar to existing languages, but just different enough to confuse practitioners of anything else.

Posh also suffers in its somewhat easy to invoke any .NET library, so people start comparing it to a more tooled programming language or something with more sane libraries, and the "ISE" is nowhere close to an IDE (why isnt powershell a first class citizen in visual studio! yes I know there are tools, they are not great.)

Nonetheless, after a few years of working in sql server I have adopted more and more posh in my life because its simply the fastest way to get things done if you are doing windows server management.

I usually find myself on one of these two places if I am looking for something:

Mike Fal (SQL Server focus, he is great) http://www.mikefal.net/

Hey Scripting Guy! https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/heyscriptingguy/

edit: forgot to mention that MSFT helped to cause problems by massive changing how the language did things over time(usually for the better), so ps1 vs ps4 is crazy different, another reason to be annoyed because which version comes with which product is a fun skew to deal with (thanks sqlps having ps2.0!)

Re: A Saner Windows Command Line

#16

Post by UK-AL »

Pxtl wrote: post #2

At our office we jokingly refer to powershell as "two googles per line" - a term coined by its strongest proponent at the company. It thought it would come naturally over time, but it never does. It seems needlessly cryptic and verbose in so many ways. I've started using LinqPad for stuff I would normally do in cmd now.

Learning Bash is just as cryptic. At least powershell function names have logic behind them.

Re: A Saner Windows Command Line

#17

Post by mattmanser »

ilek wrote: post #4
Pxtl wrote: post #2

At our office we jokingly refer to powershell as "two googles per line" - a term coined by its strongest proponent at the company. It thought it would come naturally over time, but it never does. It seems needlessly cryptic and verbose in so many ways. I've started using LinqPad for stuff I would normally do in cmd now.

Agree on that one, it's really verbose and ugly. I liked the idea of a cmd that integrates so nicely with .NET but I don't think it worked out this time. We use powershell a lot at work for developer setup stuff and other common tasks we do on a daily basis and at this point I've considered just writing my own language to do it or find something else.

Why don't you just use Python, Ruby or even C#? Why write your own language?

I wanted to learn Ruby a while back but didn't have a web project to work on so I started writing a load of scripts in Ruby instead. It worked out fine.

Re: A Saner Windows Command Line

#19

Post by gpvos »

I tried both ConEmu (twice) and Console2 in the past, but both were too unstable for regular use. If someone can convince me that the situation has markedly improved, I might try again, but I guess I'll just wait until we upgrade to Windows 10 at my workplace (which they say is any day now).

Re: A Saner Windows Command Line

#20

Post by Touche »

sz4kerto wrote: post #8
CraigJPerry wrote: post #5

Powershell and its long winded cmdlets are really hard for me to like. I always fall back to cygwin on windows. I once wrote a PS script to set some power management options on a corporate laptop. The script was 11 lines long (vs 3 lines in Python), it was harder to read and understand. Even with ISE available it was much harder to write. I followed along with some exchange server tutorial where the prescribed easy w…

> The script was 11 lines long (vs 3 lines in Python), it was harder to read and understand. Note that this might be true for one script, and the opposite might be true for another script. Something is saner in bash, something is better in PS. They have fundamental differences (text- vs. object-based), and neither of them is better than the other in all scenarios. (At least that's my experience.)

I think it's worth noting that powershell is .NET object-based. This means you can interact with powershell objects from a .NET language but not, for example, python. To me this is the fundamental flaw of PS. It's a neat idea as long as you stay within their box, within their ecosystem.

With Bash you get a wealth of tools because everything can handle text.

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