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

631–640 of 790 posts

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#631

Post by jodrellblank »

Theodores wrote: post #308
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…

Back in the day I thought VAX/VMS was amazing. Particularly things like file versioning, however, I had to leave it behind and do things on UNIX (and then Linux) terminals. That change was relatively painless even if I did delete a file or two that I should not have. However, I have moved on and nowadays I would not have a clue how to use VMS beyond typing 'dir'. If the VMS 'shell' was suddenly available on Linux, de…

I appreciate that PowerShell is new, but it does not suit my way of working, i.e. cribbing answers from StackOverflow and tutorial guides.

PowerShell is ten years old and there's 37,000 StackOverflow questions tagged to it - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/powershell

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#632

Post by jodrellblank »

ktRolster wrote: post #302
lottin wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bash I'm running is actually 3 years old. You make it sound like bash was written 27 ago and no one has touched it since then. Secondly, what constitutes an improvement is a matter of opinion. For example, I don't see this Powersell as an improvement at all.

Autocomplete in Bash was actually a revolutionary improvement

And autocomplete in PowerShell is again.

Cmdlets tell the shell their parameters, and their parameters are long names, so you can just tab through them to find a) the available parameters and b) the ones which might help you.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#633

Post by IshKebab »

CrLf wrote: post #506
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 (alth…

> Normal shell usage means doing a lot of one-shot pipelines incrementally.

Sure because no-one ever takes those "one-shot" pipelines full of `cut`s and `grep`s and distributes them in real products. /s

As far as I can tell, Powershell is designed for scripts that are meant to be distributed, so they must be robust. Normal 'text scraping' Bash is shit at that.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#635

Post by jodrellblank »

bitwize wrote: post #375

Get-CobolFingers -Variant=Microsoft -Payoff=MuchLessThanAdvertised

    Get-Cob{tab}{tab} -v{tab} M{tab} -P{tab}{tab} M{tab}
cmdlet long parameter names both a) work if you type "the shortest non-clashing prefix", and b) tab complete. And if a parameter takes an enumeration you can tab complete those, too. Which is incredibly nicer than usage: somecmd -umhcglsrfmh line noise and man page lookups.

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#636

Post by IshKebab »

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 not about complexity; it's about robustness, and avoiding insane hacks like this:

    REASON=$(echo "$line"|tr ' ' '\n'|grep reason= |cut -d= -f2)

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#637

Post by jodrellblank »

guitarbill wrote: post #406
joeblau wrote: post #250

Is there anything preventing Microsoft from putting a Linux shell natively on Windows? I'm sure PowerShell is awesome, but the DevOps person in me is not excited at all.

this x100. i wish they'd work on chef/puppet/ansible/salt support instead. probably never going to happen though, so much functionality in windows isn't available from the command line.

Yeah, probably never happen. You'd never see J. Snover the 'father of PowerShell' at ChefConf last year talking about PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) and its support for Chef (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh9zfm5gVEg) or two years ago the PowerShell team announcing a DSC Cookbook for Chef (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/powershell/2014/07/29/chef-...) or last year announcing Puppet's announcement of support for PowerShell DSC ( https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/powershell/2015/10/06/desir... )

You know that the entire point of PowerShell is to make Windows functionality available from the command line, for centralised management and configuration, for automated provisioning on Azure, right?

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#638

Post by jodrellblank »

guitarbill wrote: post #392
hoverbear wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow your comment is bafflingly low quality and stupid. Perhaps you shouldn't have submitted it.

he's not wrong though. ssh is the quickest way of accessing remove machines, not to mention secure (i have never seen remote desktop done with priv/pub key in practice). it also makes automation and transferring files easy. putty is terrible compared to ssh on linux. what i would have given for good ssh on windows back when i was still doing C#...

he's not wrong though. ssh is the quickest way of accessing remove machines

    Invoke-Command -ComputerName $ListOfComputers -Command {#code...}

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#639

Post by yread »

ldiracdelta wrote: post #180
cstross wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I don't see a tremendous amount of accumulated wisdom in Powershell. It may be newer, but I'm not sure they looked at prior art or had design members who were shell gurus in any other shell than `cmd.exe`, which is a horrific shell. Why are commands horrendously long in powershell? If you spend time in the shell, you don't want your fingers falling off due to overuse. Aside... one of the design decisions Microsoft to…

> using `\` for file hierarchies instead of `/`

You know you can use both since like XP, right? You can even mix them up in one path which can look quite confusing c:/windows\system32/etc/drivers\

Re: PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

#640

Post by wcoenen »

CrLf wrote: post #506
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 (alth…

> 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.

Lojban[1] is usable in practice (though that may be because it still allows you to be ambiguous when desired).

[1] http://lojban.org

Post reply on HN