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Comment by ktpsns | Hacker News Reader

> Note: If you are on Microsoft Windows without a UNIX like environment you might want to re-evaluate your life choices at this moment.

Great sentence! However, Powershell got quite mature. `cat -n` is definetly something you will be able to do in Powershell with a similarly lengthy command.

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Of course. Get-Content puts every line of text into the pipeline as a .Net String object with a few additional attributes added on, including ReadCount which is the line number. For example:

Get-Content -Path TEXT.TXT | %{"$($_.ReadCount) $($_.Length) $($_.ToUpper())" }

For each line of text, this will print the line number, the length of the string, and the string converted into upper case.

PowerShell is very wordy, but very powerful.

I'm neither a sh nor powershell guru, but, it kinda feels like that Powershell was intended more as a scripting language, less as a commandline language. sh / bash / etc commands are more terse, but harder to read if they're composed into a shell script.

I mean I still can't wrap my head around [ being a command / executable usable in conditions.

The terseness of Bash etc. is a tradeoff. "cat" is short for "concatenate." It's common use to list a single file is more the exploitation of an ambiguous API than a feature...concatenation of one file is like the sound of one hand clapping. I mean "to display the contents of a file use 'cat filename'" is an example of how *nix terseness makes understanding dependent on oral tradition rather than clear written communication. Even the man page doesn't describe using cat to display the contents of a single file [1]. It is only implied via the stdin example once a person understands the abstract relationship between the terminal and files.

[1]: https://linux.die.net/man/1/cat

Since shell languages invariably end up becoming scripting languages (see: Bourne shell and resulting nightmare), Powershell targets being a good tool for both purposes.

When scripting and writing documentation, full commandlet names are encouraged:

  Get-ChildItem | Where-Object { $_.Name.Contains("evidence") } | Remove-Item

When using the command line, there are built-in shortcuts (and users may define their own aliases):

  gci | ?{ $_.name.contains("evidence") } | ri

For the convenience of those hopelessly entrenched in Bourne shell, there are some default aliases:

  ls | ?{ $_.name.contains("evidence") } | rm

Since shell languages invariably end up becoming scripting languages

We need to start paying attention to this phenomenon.

It’s like | perl -pe ‘$_=join(“ “, $., length, uc)’, but with brand new syntax, so cool. PS also can help you build any non-mingw/make/sh based dependency, if you find one.

20 years using unix systems and never used cat with arguments.

nl(1)

I agree that nl is better for line numbering, but have you really never used cat with arguments? One of the most common use cases is for concatenating files:

    cat file1 file2 > combined-file

There file1 and file2 are arguments. What do you use cat for?

I mean flag arguments.

sed {} file1 file2 > combined-file

Depends, some people do prefer environments that are more welcoming to the Xerox PARC ideas of how a development environment should look like.

Haven't tried WSL yet but that's an option. Also most if not all of the GNU coreutils are available on Windows.

The file system performance was horrendous when I last used it for anything serious last fall.

Which matters if you have 15k packages from npm to get (been there, done that) but doesn't matter at all when you're programming in Go.

Dep/Glide can get pretty slow.

File system performance seems great for me, but I've only been seriously using WSL for the last 6 months or so.

That being said, there are some major performance issues with how certain programs map memory and, as a result, things like Haskell are an absolute pain to use.

I'm using Haskell right now. It's fine.

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