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legacy2013

This is cool, but I hope the new Linux Subsystem in Windows 10 will propagate enough that everything can be written in bash

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i will never understand why people fetishize that awful language.

It's significantly better than batch

Well sure, but these days PowerShell is what Windows people use for anything non-trivial.

It is significantly better than PowerShell.

and significantly worse too.

Really? I though PowerShell was designed primarily to replace cmd. Surely Windows people use actual programming languages for the majority of tasks with PowerShell/cmd for smaller scripting tasks.

PowerShell took everything that was great about .NET and combined it with everything that was terrible about Bash. So we have, yet again, a difficult to understand language for shell scripting.

Why is it bad? I've been able to write some pretty great PS scripts to automate tasks. It's easier than firing up Visual Studio and writing a C# program I'd need to recompile if I ever want to change it.

Have you considered F#? Works well for scripting.

It's very powerful but the syntax is step back 20 years:

    If ($Number -gt 0)

That's just one example. There is a lot of really confusing stuff in powershell that's entirely unnecessary. There were going for some kind of Bash-shell familiarity which, oddly enough, most Windows developers don't even have.

I'd say the usage of -lt and the like is because angle brackets are used for piping data.

The shell is a mess of symbols making any sane programming language impossible. Instead of perhaps rethinking the "mess of symbols" issue they ruined the language instead.

And PowerShell is an awful shell; it's great for script automation of windows, but as a shell, just no. Microsoft recognizes this, it's the reason a full Ubuntu bash shell is available in Windows 10.

> Microsoft recognizes this

MS also tried to improve PowerShell by installing the PSReadLine module by default.

Read https://github.com/lzybkr/PSReadLine for instructions on how to make PS a bit more usable.

The problem with PowerShell is its syntax, not the extra features of the shell environment. Trying to expose the .Net runtime to the command line is an admirable goal for a scripting language, not a shell. It comes down to this, PowerShell is a catherderal, bash and tools are a bizarre, and that's why they win IMHO. Personally the best shell for any Windows box is to install cygwin and treat it like a Linux box, and on Windows 10 just install Ubuntu and have a real Linux shell.

Windows servers are a dying breed and Microsoft knows it, they've lost that war and are quickly porting everything they can to run on Linux including their .Net runtime and Sql Server; they know they've lost the war, it's only a matter of time.

>bash and tools are a bizarre

You mean bazaar. Nice typo though.

bah, yea, thanks.

Most of my big complaints about syntax are related to the shell-ness of PowerShell. For example, when comparing things, I really want to use '<' and '>' rather than -le and -gt.

Generally though, the syntax is different but once you learn it, it's mostly fine and sometimes the text-based nature of Unix commands means you have to do a lot more reg-exing.

For example, compare these two:

    ps -ef | grep "chrome" | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill

    ps -name chrome | kill

Of course it's just a matter of preference, but I prefer the the PowerShell version.

Um... pkill chrome, still prefer bash/gnu tools. The bazaar has far more tools, you just have to find the right one.

> and sometimes the text-based nature of Unix commands means you have to do a lot more reg-exing.

That's a feature that has far more upside than downside.

I didn't know about pkill, thanks!

My point still stands. They are different but (IMHO) both excellent. Ubuntu on Windows may eventually reach parity with PowerShell but until then, PowerShell is worth knowing (especially if you follow Microsoft's advice and run servers without the GUI installed).

I agree it's worth knowing, I just don't like it. My prefferred avenue will be porting all .Net stuff to Linux servers and just getting rid of all Windows servers as it becomes possible. .Net is great, C# is great, Windows isn't and I'm glad to see Microsoft's new CEO isn't blind to that reality.

Until your enterprise security people have a fit at something like PowerSploit [1] existing and turn on AllSigned via Group Policy. Then it's pretty much impossible to use PowerShell - edit, sign, test, edit, sign is quite painful with the current tooling (and that's even if you're "trusted" enough to get the codesigning cert). Not to mention that some of the scripts that Visual Studio uses aren't signed!

1: https://github.com/PowerShellMafia/PowerSploit

I think it's your incorrect assumption that bash's popularity is due to it being a "fetish" for anyone. There aren't alternatives that are both better and more available / cross-platform / standard.

I agree its a crappy language, but remember, it's a shell, not a language. It serves a different purpose than being good for pure code, so saying something like "<your favorite scripting language here> is better than bash" doesn't hold a whole lot of water. It is way better than batch though.

"<your favorite scripting language here> is better than bash at the kind of tasks that bash is used for" would be a pretty substantial claim, though. (Unfortunately, it's almost never the claim that people are making. "X is better than bash at creating UIs/database lookups/OO/web programming"? Yeah, of course it is. Water's wet, too.)

Jokes on you, they're going to end up baking bash commands into PowerShell.

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