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Comment by AskewEgret | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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