Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

azure.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 790 posts

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#501

Post by Jayku1 »

lucb1e wrote: post #408
JeffreySnover wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not quite right. At the end of the day it is all about automation. But we took the position that the way Admins automate is by scripting the things that they do in an interactive shell. Bruce Payette had a great way of saying it - he said that the lifecycle of 99% of scripts starts at the prompt and ends at the carriage return. Then, somethings you want to codify things so you put it into a script. Then as th…

That is not quite right either. I enter about 200 commands on a normal workday and write maybe two scripts a month in a shell language. A shell language should be a shell language, it's not merely a stepping stone to write a script after using a command just once. If that's what I'm looking for I'll use Python. And from the other side, Python would be a terrible shell (by default), and that's fine because that's not…

This is a really strange argument -- he's saying that PowerShell was designed so that you could more easily move from shell to script to library ...

Your counter is -- you don't do that? Of course you don't, because your shell is bash. That's exactly the point. If your shell is bash, when you write a script you use a different language. What if there was a shell where you could actually script ...

You're absolutely right, PowerShell is made for both, and it has made compromises (like using comparison operators like -eq instead of ==).

Compromises are not inherently bad.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#502

Post by mbrumlow »

haberman wrote: post #472
mbrumlow wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I happen to find your example of why to use a object a bit hilarious. You are right, readelf has the object in a structure -- because that is what elf is... typedef struct { uint32_t st_name; unsigned char st_info; unsigned char st_other; uint16_t st_shndx; Elf64_Addr st_value; uint64_t st_size; } Elf64_Sym; If you wanted the object why did you need readelf in the first place? Why not just read the elf format directl…

You're asking me why I use a tool instead of parsing a binary format manually? Does that really need explanation? If that is your attitude, why use any command-line tools ever? Why use "ls" when you can call readdir()? Why use "ps" when you can parse /proc? You just pointed me to Kernighan and Pike a second ago. I didn't expect I would need to justify why piping standard tools together is better than programming ever…

I never said anything about not liking command line tools. In fact I love them and think they do a awesome job!

In any case you just proved my point. You think its insane to parse binary data while scripting and I do too. That is why I think the passing binary objects is insane on the shell.

Now if you were talking about text base objects (not binary ones) then that is an entirely different story and I feel that is what we do today. In your example you have rows which could be called objects, and members which would be separated out in columns. To argue a different text base format is better than another is not something I am interested in doing -- mostly because there are a million different ways one could format the output. If you were to do "objects" I think they would have to be in binary to get any of the benefits one could perceived.

To be honest I feel the output you posted is a bug in readlef. I would expect all data from that column to be in the same base.

I will level with you I can see some benefits of having binary passed between command line programs but I think the harm it would do would outweigh the benefit.

But if you you really wanted to do that you could. There is nothing stopping command line utility makers from outputting a binary or any other formats of text. You don't need shell to make that happen.

What I think everybody is asking for is for command line developers to standardize their output to something parsable -- which I feel that most command line utilities already do that. They give you many different ways to format the data as it is. Some do this better than others, and I think that would hold true even if somebody forced all programs to only produce binary, or json text format when pipped.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#503

Post by Jayku1 »

mschuetz wrote: post #161
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.

Yeah, I wanted to switch to PowerShell but then I had to call an exe with variable arguments from the PowerShell script. That was a quick way back to cmd.

They fixed this in later versions with the literal: --%

But you can also always use start-process like:

start-process app @'

your arguments and parameters go here

'@

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#504

Post by Jayku1 »

Touche wrote: post #336
ksk wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate on what the actual complexity is, rather than what you imagine? For a developer writing a tool, exposing an interface as objects is far easier than having to constantly serialize data into a string. Keep in mind that once you serialize data into a string, you can never change the order of the data or else other tools will break. Not so with a object based interface. In other system-admin type task…

> Could you elaborate on what the actual complexity is, rather than what you imagine? I can only use this feature by using a .NET language. I can't take the strongly typed objects into a Node.js script, or a perl script.

That's not really true, you can serialize as json in all of those

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#505

Post by deno »

RubyPinch wrote: post #493
deno wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don’t, it’s more of a feeling. With an open-source release like .NET it seems more like better documentation. In fact that was the case for early commercial Unixes—you needed the source code to actually use the system, but it wasn’t open-source. Open-source as-documentation (for lack of better term) is still useful. It makes bug fixing a whole lot easier, for one thing. But it’s not quite the same as open-so…

do you more mean like, the decisions, and planned changes, etc, aren't open? (along with being tied to the whims of the CEO and the company's money?)

They might be open, but there’s democracy and then there’s democracy. See for example recent MSBuild incident (but don’t try to argue about it it’s just an example).

As I said, it’s a feeling. The feeling is it’s Microsoft’s project, everyone else is along for a ride. And that’s fine, but it’s something different. Let’s just not pretend technical merits drive adoption, that’s rarely true.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#506

Post by CrLf »

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…

After a number of years using PowerShell, my conclusion is the opposite: text "scraping" is just better for most cases.

Normal shell usage means doing a lot of one-shot pipelines incrementally. This is just easier and faster to do when passing text around because you can look at it and not have to inspect some object for it's type and what attributes/methods it provides. Parsing the text is not the problem here (although many people think it is), reasoning about what we're trying to do is.

And the over-verbose syntax doesn't help.

I compare this to human languages. It would be tempting to create a language with minimum ambiguity and clear cut concepts, but it wouldn't be practical. I guess PowerShell as an interactive shell is somewhat like this.

For automation, PowerShell is nice. The language sits between a shell script and going the Perl/Python route, but I still prefer shell scripts for simpler things and Perl/Python for more complex tools.

Having said this, PowerShell is the only sane choice on Windows and has made my life easier by no small amount. I never enjoyed managing Windows servers with their focus on GUI tools and their terrible CLI. PowerShell changed that and even "invaded" products like SQL Server and Exchange making them also nice to manage.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#507

Post by blakeyrat »

lucb1e wrote: post #408
JeffreySnover wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not quite right. At the end of the day it is all about automation. But we took the position that the way Admins automate is by scripting the things that they do in an interactive shell. Bruce Payette had a great way of saying it - he said that the lifecycle of 99% of scripts starts at the prompt and ends at the carriage return. Then, somethings you want to codify things so you put it into a script. Then as th…

That is not quite right either. I enter about 200 commands on a normal workday and write maybe two scripts a month in a shell language. A shell language should be a shell language, it's not merely a stepping stone to write a script after using a command just once. If that's what I'm looking for I'll use Python. And from the other side, Python would be a terrible shell (by default), and that's fine because that's not…

You could just use WSH (Windows Scripting Host) with either VBScript or JScript the way you've always been able to. AFAIK, Windows has shipped with that scripting solution since like Windows 2000 or possibly even earlier.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#508

Post by crpatino »

blakeyrat wrote: post #496
madmax96 wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much this. What the M$ community fails to see is that text streams can be consumed by __everyone__. We've basically all accepted the fact that programs are used longer and in different ways than we'd expect. A brittle object model can only lead to vendor lock in and indigestible output.

The dollar sign is charming. There's a few points here: 1) Not all data is text. In fact, very little of the data people see/work with day-to-day is raw text. It's silly to transform a PNG image into text to be able to pipe it around. (Or to pipe around its filename instead and have a dozen tools all having to open and re-parse it each time.) 2) There's nothing on PowerShell preventing you from serializing a piece of…

> Even if you come up with a great way to improve the output, doesn't matter, you've still broken everything.

You phrase this as if changing things for the sake of changing was a good thing. It is not.

Well, perhaps it is good for the software vendor, but from the customer's point of view, having to re-learn how to do the same stuff over and over every other year is a PITA.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#509

Post by jdmichal »

mhurron wrote: post #401
jdmichal wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm assuming that the Powershell port includes some subset of the standard cmdlets, which will handle serializing to and from objects.

A subset means it doesn't work as well or the same way.

No... It just means that all features may not be available. It makes no comments on how well the existing features work and how compatible they are with the Windows version.

I mean, `Get-ComputerRestorePoint` and `Get-WmiObject` don't mean anything on Linux. I assume those won't be ported. `Get-Process` is certainly meaningful; I assume that will be. The ports might also have cmdlets not available on Windows. I could certainly see cmdlets to interact with `apt` in Ubuntu, or `yum` in RHEL. Especially since PowerShell is focused on provisioning and managing machines.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#510

Post by vmarsy »

artursapek wrote: post #351
vmarsy wrote: post #79

Great! So I can now run bash on windows (with WSL), open tmux, and open powershell prompts in each tab: the loop is complete! I wish powershell's documentation was a bit more clear about what's powershell 1.0, 2.0, 3.0... Etc. A lot of time I'd find a verbose and tedious way to do one thing because the code was written in "old powershell", when the latest version had a much more elegant solution (either because of ne…

Does tmux work well on Windows? Everything Microsoft has been doing recently with bash on Windows has made me consider buying a surface pro as my next machine.

I was a big GNU Screen user on linux, which unfortunately doesn't work on WSL. So I tried tmux, and it works fine for the few minutes I tried it: Create new tabs, detach session, etc.

But once you close the Bash primary window, the session dies, so it's not as persistent as running tmux on a Linux machine, which makes sense given how WSL works. I haven't figured out yet if there is a way to always keep WSL running in the background so that I could close the bash terminal, reopen, and reattach my tmux session.

Post reply on HN