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Microsoft Replaces Command Prompt with PowerShell in Latest Windows 10 Build

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Re: Microsoft Replaces Command Prompt with PowerShell in Latest Windows 10 Build

#201

Post by gecko »

ergot wrote: post #197

Powershell is very insecure and is heavily abused by potential attackers as it's more flexible than CMD.exe. Of course, arguing about CMD.exe vs PS.exe is pointless, but it still needs to be argued. There has been a recent spate of talks in Blackhat conf. and other confs, about the versatility of PS.exe, how it is used to perform persistence in comparably little characters, or lines of script than CMD.exe Some of my…

I'm really confused here. What attack vectors apply to PowerShell, but not to a situation where I can invoke cmd.exe? I can tell PowerShell to only run signed scripts, and specify what signatures to honor, which is more than I can do with either cmd.exe or WSH. You're citing compactness of scripts, but a straight-up binary would be more compact still. I think I'm missing something pretty basic here.

Re: Microsoft Replaces Command Prompt with PowerShell in Latest Windows 10 Build

#202

Post by zokier »

Tarean wrote: post #188
zokier wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article would partially disagree with you: > Typing cmd in the run dialog will launch PowerShell as well, so Microsoft has made a significant step towards phasing out the traditional Command Prompt. Imho that sounds like stupid idea (and I like PS).

Currently powershell just shells out to cmd.exe to run normal command line apps And handle text streams anyway. How would that work?

My guess is that MS will keep old cmd in place in system32, and do some tricks with search paths to divert "unqualified" cmd to PS.

Re: Microsoft Replaces Command Prompt with PowerShell in Latest Windows 10 Build

#203

Post by brazzledazzle »

Diti wrote: post #35

Something that irks me is how PowerShell’s default aliases take precedence over binaries in the PATH. To be able to use the GNU utils, you have to put this in your profile.ps1 : Remove-Item Alias:cat Remove-Item Alias:cp Remove-Item Alias:curl Remove-Item Alias:echo Remove-Item Alias:ls Remove-Item Alias:man Remove-Item Alias:mv Remove-Item Alias:pwd Remove-Item Alias:rm Remove-Item Alias:wget

I don't think this is a good default for posh on nix platforms but I would argue that it's a good thing on Windows. The output of PowerShell ls is an object with typed properties and methods that you can interact with in a much richer way.

Not to mention user experience. Adding these aliases made moving back-and-forth between nix and Windows much less jarring for me. They also really helped drive home the difference between something like bash and posh because investigating the differences between the aliases and their nix namesakes revealed their respective strengths and weaknesses.

I imagine changing aliases would be out of the question since they should have priority over PATH but perhaps a special conditional case for these the first time they're run interactively would be to check for the nix equivalent in your PATH and prompt to see if you'd like to remove them.

Re: Microsoft Replaces Command Prompt with PowerShell in Latest Windows 10 Build

#204

Post by ashmud »

Klathmon wrote: post #181
ashmud wrote: post #167

I know we have machines with lots of RAM now, but at 90-100MB (PS) vs 4MB (CMD) [1] RAM usage per instance (not counting the conhost instance that also spawns), I think I would still want CMD around. [1] Quick check done on my Win7x64 laptop.

Does that really affect you in any way? (And I'm really asking, not trying to be snarky, I've got 64gb on my main dev machine so I really don't know...) I can't imagine any scenario in my actual usage where I'll have 4mb (plus whatever is needed to actually do the work) but not 100mb (plus whatever is needed to actually do the work). Also, on my machine (windows 10 stable branch) each PS window takes up about 20mb (a…

My work machine is not nearly that beefy. :| I do often have 8-10 cmd windows open. According to task manager on my machine, each PS instance on start is 90-100MB. I didn't dig deeper to see if that RAM usage would shrink over time.

Re: Microsoft Replaces Command Prompt with PowerShell in Latest Windows 10 Build

#205

Post by UnoriginalGuy »

tonyplee wrote: post #200

What happens if someone have batch files for some work flow routines? Have to re-write all of them?

Nothing. Bat is a filetype, that file type is bound to executive in CMD's context. You can even execute it from PS and have it run the Bat perfectly normally (using CMD).

Ditto with VBS. You can execute VBS files from any context on Windows (e.g. double click, PS, CMD, etc) and they'll always use the cscript engine.

Re: Microsoft Replaces Command Prompt with PowerShell in Latest Windows 10 Build

#206

Post by UnoriginalGuy »

ergot wrote: post #197

Powershell is very insecure and is heavily abused by potential attackers as it's more flexible than CMD.exe. Of course, arguing about CMD.exe vs PS.exe is pointless, but it still needs to be argued. There has been a recent spate of talks in Blackhat conf. and other confs, about the versatility of PS.exe, how it is used to perform persistence in comparably little characters, or lines of script than CMD.exe Some of my…

Anything VBS can do, Powershell can do ("everything" that a running user has the security for). Number of characters isn't relevant to scenarios where you're running PS/VBS/CMD on a local machine.

PS - Your "PS breaker" machine configuration is going to cause problems. Several of Microsoft's installers already run PS scripts behind the scenes. Plus you're doing it for absolutely no technical reason (just ignorant fear).

Re: Microsoft Replaces Command Prompt with PowerShell in Latest Windows 10 Build

#207

Post by bitwize »

nneonneo wrote: post #166
nailer wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Windows terminal people use ConEmu rather than the inbuilt terminal apps - it's like iTerm2 vs Terminal.app on MacOS. ConEmu adds Unix style cut and paste, tabs, etc. Add openssh, PSReadLine and PSCX and you've got a proper terminal setup. Also MS should really improve the inbuilt apps to do this stuff.

I've used iTerm and Terminal on Mac, and the default Windows Terminal (conhost), PuTTY sand MinTTY on Windows. Terminal.app is much, much better than conhost, even after the Windows 10 update. It's fast, supports a ton of thoughtful features (such as customizable title bars via extended ANSI codes, real line wrapping during resize, good Unicode support from the very beginning, etc.). With Terminal.app I can be quite…

> PowerShell's terminal experience is better but not quite there. And, PS suffers from extremely long load times - I've seen it take upwards of 10 seconds to start without any extensions.

Small price to pay to be able to pipe objects, man!

Re: Microsoft Replaces Command Prompt with PowerShell in Latest Windows 10 Build

#209

Post by WayneBro »

Windows fan here. I hate PowerShell and I'd much rather have Bash built into Windows. Things I hate about PowerShell:

- You can't even run your own scripts without performing the Set-ExecutionPolicy ceremony first or signing your scripts.

- It's way too verbose.

- It's a strange bird that next to nobody uses, so there's zero motivation to learn it.

- It's not "old reliable". You can't depend on it working due to the first point and also due to the fact that they're still working on it and even in 2016 they broke some PowerShell stuff with updates that needed to be uninstalled (KB3176934).

Re: Microsoft Replaces Command Prompt with PowerShell in Latest Windows 10 Build

#210

Post by Goronmon »

jbb555 wrote: post #130
Goronmon wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're not a fan of change, I feel like software development probably isn't the right career choice.

I'm not a fan of BAD change.

Nothing would change if the pre-requisite to any given change was that everyone agreed on the change beforehand.
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