PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux • Hacker News Board

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#121

Post by ktRolster » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 4:21 PM UTC

amenod wrote: post #32

Analemma_ wrote: post #6

PowerShell is my guilty pleasure of the computing world. Once you've piped strongly-typed objects around between your shell commands, text scraping seems barbaric by comparison. The problem, of course, is that you can't use all that power for much, since the pool of PS-compatible tools and utilities is much shallower than it is for Unix shells. I'm really hoping this will help spur a new wave of PowerShell-compatible…

Is this really so useful in practice? I have never used PowerShell before (nor do I have plans to do so in the near future), but I would imagine the downside is complexity, both for user and especially for developers. With text you just read and parse, while with objects you need to know the object type, its fields,... Whatever happend, I hope text stays here (and I have a bad feeling about it ever since I met system…

It's nice when it works, but it's a pain to write a command-line utility that outputs into objects. Whereas in Unix, everything automatically outputs into text, so you have to work hard to prevent it from being chainable to the system.

There are also details of Powershell that are very annoying, such as the lack of < redirect, and the difficulties it has on binary output sometimes.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#122

Post by Sylos » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 4:21 PM UTC

cstross wrote: post #54

larrik wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a full-time Linux user, I have to say that bash is overrated. For instance, on Windows I could press the up arrow through my history 20x to find a group of commands I want to run, press Enter, then press DOWN for the following command, then enter, then DOWN until I run them all. In Bash, I need to press UP 20x every single time. Yes, you can customize it a lot, and you can script it but default bash isn't that spe…

Bash is 27 years old. It was written to replace the Bourne shell, which is 39 . It is not terribly surprising that a 9 year old tool like Powershell made some improvements over an earlier tool that was already old enough to vote!

Well, it's not an improvement, it's just a different design-choice. I for example much prefer Bash's way of doing it.

Also, Bash does have a way of doing it the Powershell-way, if you want that, as others have commented.

Which is also why I disagree with your statement. Bash may be old, but neither the underlying technology nor the use-case changed much in that time. So, there is not a whole lot where you can innovate with a new tool, at least not for such basic tasks, and instead, Bash has matured throughout 27 years to perfectly fit that underlying technology and use-case that millions of people have.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#123

Post by duiker101 » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 4:21 PM UTC

I like Microsoft's move here. They first made available bash on Windows and then PowerShell on Linux. So no one is going to cry. And now they will improve PowerShell and win over users with a good tool rather than just because that's the only one available.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#124

Post by arca_vorago » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 4:22 PM UTC

voltagex_ wrote: post #36

>We will be extending the PowerShell Remoting Protocol (MS-PSRP) to use OpenSSH as a native transport. Users will have the option to use SSH or WINRM as a transport. Is possibly an even bigger announcement (this means there's actual momentum behind https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH )

This is what I have been waiting for right here!

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#125

Post by agumonkey » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 4:23 PM UTC

Analemma_ wrote: post #6

PowerShell is my guilty pleasure of the computing world. Once you've piped strongly-typed objects around between your shell commands, text scraping seems barbaric by comparison. The problem, of course, is that you can't use all that power for much, since the pool of PS-compatible tools and utilities is much shallower than it is for Unix shells. I'm really hoping this will help spur a new wave of PowerShell-compatible…

I wonder what's the difference between an object-pipable shell and a lisp machine (only 10% troll here). Kalman Reti said that passing pointers as IPC meant zero perf penalty btw. Text serialization has design value sometimes, but the amount of cpu cycles allocated on string munging seems flabbergasting.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#126

Post by joshstrange » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 4:24 PM UTC

PeCaN wrote: post #107

amenod wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this really so useful in practice? I have never used PowerShell before (nor do I have plans to do so in the near future), but I would imagine the downside is complexity, both for user and especially for developers. With text you just read and parse, while with objects you need to know the object type, its fields,... Whatever happend, I hope text stays here (and I have a bad feeling about it ever since I met system…

I find it massively useful in practice, even for mundane tasks. For example, the other day I was trying to search the columns of a very large SQL Server table¹ but also needed information about the column type. …\dbo.site> ls Columns | select Name, DataType, {$_.Properties['Length'].Value} | where {$_.Name -like '*int*'} Name DataType $_.Properties['Length'].Value ---- -------- ----------------------------- internal_…

How would that be hard in a *nix shell?

    mysql > SELECT  column_name, data_type, numeric_precision FROM information_schema.columns WHERE table_schema = ? AND table_name = ? AND column_name LIKE "%int%"

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#127

Post by satysin » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 4:24 PM UTC

mikestew wrote: post #112

satysin wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that principle is true from all high-level languages as you move down the chain. Shell scripts should be 1-20 lines. Python/Ruby/whatever for 20-100 and compiled for anything >100.

I was about to refute you with a recent example of mine that just needed to serially execute a bunch of commands, and it's well over 20 lines. Then I remembered that I needed to introduce some branching logic, said "not in bash, I'm not", and rewrote it in Python. So for me, it's not a matter of LoC but complexity. Need to copy file from here to there, then commit to git repo, blah, blah, blah, then kick off a build?…

Well it isn't a hard limit. I am okay with a 25 line script for example ;)

Well really you are more right than me. It is about complexity more than the number of lines. However for the most part the longer something is the more complex it is to work with even if it does something simple. Managing a 1000 line bash script is almost certainly going to be more painful than doing it "properly" in Python or Java or whatever.

It mostly comes to do this for me "is this thing going to be something I need to understand and manage outside of my own little bubble?" if it is then I want it to be better designed/maintained and I find that gets easier as I work "down the chain".

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#128

Post by cptskippy » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 4:24 PM UTC

AimHere wrote: post #83

wvenable wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the strongly-typed cookies but I absolutely hate the powershell syntax. It's like C# and Bash got together and had a really ugly baby.

As long as you bear in mind that it's main purpose is a usable replacement for the CMD.EXE batch language, then you should be willing to forgive Powershell it's warts.

I would hope it's also meant to put vbscript out to pasture as well.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#129

Post by ThatGeoGuy » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 4:25 PM UTC

larrik wrote: post #17

tombert wrote: post #9

I'm always in favor of things being open-sourced, but I do kind of wonder in what universe I would use PowerShell when Bash is readily available.

As a full-time Linux user, I have to say that bash is overrated. For instance, on Windows I could press the up arrow through my history 20x to find a group of commands I want to run, press Enter, then press DOWN for the following command, then enter, then DOWN until I run them all. In Bash, I need to press UP 20x every single time. Yes, you can customize it a lot, and you can script it but default bash isn't that spe…

>For instance, on Windows I could press the up arrow through my history 20x to find a group of commands I want to run, press Enter, then press DOWN for the following command, then enter, then DOWN until I run them all. In Bash, I need to press UP 20x every single time.

I know other users have addressed this issue in other comments with solutions, but you do know this isn't an issue with Bash so much as it is with readline, right? There are plenty of ways to customize readline/inputrc to make it do what you want. There's even linenoise, if you hate readline for what it is. It wouldn't matter how good Bash got as a shell language, this scenario wouldn't be any easier unless readline also gets a facelift.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#130

Post by perlgeek » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 4:25 PM UTC

Can I write tools that use PowerShell and .NET objects in non-.NET languages, like Python or Perl (using the C implementations, not a .net python)? Like, is there an API that I can implement to interact to implement PowerShell-like "native" tools?