Linux Bash vs. Windows PowerShell

@vedipen, thera's a typo in bash "if" example, an if-block is closed with "fi".

edit: "if" example also misses a semicolon before "then".

The real difference is: in any reasonable bash script there will be a significant amount of awk, cut, tr and other commands to munge the output of one command into the input expected by the next. In PowerShell that totally goes away.

This is a pretty poor comparison of the two, especially once it gets into the syntax, of which most of the Bash examples are broken in some way.

There’s also a lot of just straight errors, such as mentioning “true” and “false” “values” in Bash, which don’t exist—the userland toolset includes “true” and “false” programs that can be used to inject desired exit code status into some logic flow, but there is no real concept of a Boolean type.

Overall, if you’re going to provide a rundown of how x and y compare, you should probably give real examples, not just a laundry list of “instead of grep, we use select-string; instead of sed we use -replace”. But how do you use them? I worked with Powershell some over a decade ago, but this article doesn’t give enough info for me to understand what to do with the information it’s providing. And given the errors in describing how Bash works, I’m skeptical that the Powershell examples are syntactically correct either.

By 'goes away' do you mean you don't need it or there's nothing equivalent?

Article might be more successful if it demonstrated some of the advantages of PowerShell, such as returning the output as objects instead of lines, and what you can do with them as a result.

I'll admit to being in the "Bash is what I know, I'll just install WSL/Cygwin/PuTTY on my Windows workstation and be done with it" crowd. PowerShell is on my bucket list of things I need to learn at some point, or at the very least just get a RosettaCode cheatsheet of common stuff I do in bash and how to do it in PowerShell for when I'm stuck on remote Windows servers.