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Comment by wilsonnb3 | Hacker News Reader

> Tools like Git Bash and MSYS2 let me write one set of build scripts that work across Windows, macOS and Linux, because all of the tools exist on the three platforms.

Powershell is cross platform too these days, which makes this kind of a moot point.

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Powershell on Windows is great because there’s a module for everything. I’d rather parse structured data.

Powershell on Linux isn’t worth is because I end up having to parse everything as text anyway, completely negating any benefit I can come up with. It doesn’t feel as natural as the *nix tools to me.

For what it's worth, I've had the opposite experience, maybe because I work in a different domain. Personally, I still think using Powershell functions and treating lines as string objects is an improvement over bash and its mini-languages, anyway; and most standard Unix commands have Powershell close equivalents. Some Powershell expressions might be abstruse but so is, say, awk; but when you've learned awk you only know awk; whereas the Powershell technique you used (calculated fields in select-object, for example) is permanently useful. I do spend a lot of my time with various random APIs so Powershell is pretty joyful compared to (say) curl/jq or yq-ish stuff. There was a real adjustment period, of course, getting used to a new shell; but it was the best thing about my experiment with Windows (discovering a new shell that I now use on my Unix-like systems, because I did not end up wanting to adopt Windows).

So I'm curious what kinds of things you mean when you say you have to parse everything as text anyway. I suspect you've needed to a lot more of those kinds of tasks than I have.

Powershell's CSV, XML and JSON handing is my favourite Powershell feature. Completely agree with you that it beats a *nix shell and things like jq. If I was interacting with those all day I might be convinced to use it more.

What I mean by parsing as text was more about actual commands.

I wasn't expecting 1:1, but as an example, let's say I wanted to get a list of local users on a machine.

On Windows I can use "Get-LocalUser". It returns an object with properties you can filter, output with a format, etc. Basic stuff that saves me doing any thinking. I like that. It's amazing how column titles add to the user friendliness.

On Linux, Get-LocalUser doesn't exist, so I could run something like "getent passwd". It's only option is to return a screen of text. There's no structure yet, just lines and colons. Now I can (even though I shouldn't) grab fields with cut, or awk, and filter with grep, and maybe output something pretty at the end with column. What does the 5th column mean again?

So on the Linux side, I've never been very motivated to use it, since I often have to fall back to old ways anyway.

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense. I can see a lot of similar cases especially for sysadmin things (systemctl, ifconfig, etc.).

One thing that was nice about my adopting Powershell as my daily shell is that for the most part, I could just use the same shell utilities as usual:

  getent passwd | cut -f6 -d':' | sort | uniq -c

Like, there's no problem running that in powershell. I know people have talked about "mixing" strings and objects but, I have to say that for me I've rarely run into a problem with it?

As you learn you can do a little more. Maybe you learn that group (group-object) can be used instead of the two commands at the end:

  getent passwd | cut -f6 -d':' | group

And for me, the nice thing is that when you learn something like that, it's leverageable across all your cases. You learned something about your tool, not just about the passwd file.

Is this better than bash? I don't think it's worse:

  getent passwd | %{ ($_ -split ':')[5] } | group

But then you might notice that your data is a CSV (C for colon in this case) and you might leverage some of the CSV-handling which works well in Powershell:

  getent passwd | convertfrom-csv -del ':' -h 'user','pwd','uid','gid','comment','home','shell' | group -prop 'shell'

Now you're cooking with structured data again. I think familiarity makes this kind of thing come naturally. And since these commands are pretty discoverable, because they're more consistent, and tab-completion and command-line editing are so much better than bash. It's easy to see how the above can be made terser by stashing it into utility function or a hashtable in your profile (e.g. so you could do "getent passwd | fields passwd" or something like that.

Now, I'm not going to tell someone it's worth the growing pains and adjustments to switch. It's like switching keyboard layouts. And matters of taste might turn you off, understandable. But for me there have been real benefits, and on its merits, I do think it makes a better shell. And it would be nice (from my perspective) if the community did some more work around these use cases and making them nicer for people.

You learn all of that, find yourself logged into somebody else’s server, and you only have bash again.

Sorry, trying to be funny, not dismissive.

I think shells in general could use some rethinking, considering they still feel pretty 80s.

Familiarity (or my lack of) is likely a big reason I’ll miss the obvious.

Zsh fills in many of the same checkboxes while being similar enough you don’t lose muscle memory when you find a bash shell somewhere.

Maybe someday something else will take over. Windows has the advantage there, for sure.

Oh, it's not dismissive at all. It's not just a real consideration, it's an overriding one. I switched my "daily driver" shell to powershell but I still write CI/CD scripts in bash, and docker entrypoints, and cloud-init userdata, and utilities, because it's niche enough to be too much to ask my coworkers and community folks to also switch.

I do wonder about the muscle memory thing. I think having to create scripts in bash keeps my hand in enough that I won't lose it too badly. At least I hope so. I compared switching shells to switching keyboard layouts; something I also did, and something where it's been some effort to retain enough muscle memory to not completely flail when presented with another computer.

Bash is bloated. I have seen bash executables in the megabytes range. Preinstalled bash is not an argument in favour of using it.

Extracted, this Linux build of Powershell (v7.4.5) 174MB.

Yeah, it's hard to do a direct comparison, because bash needs a bunch of other utilities to be useful and they also take up space. In theory you can pick and choose but woe be to you if you want to use bash without sed, awk, cut, etc.

But it's true that, like, you get help with Powershell but that might not matter on a system where you wouldn't choose to install man pages or something.

> Powershell on Windows is great because there’s a module for everything. I’d rather parse structured data.

It’s also really slow for text processing, borderline unusable

> Powershell on Linux isn’t worth is because I end up having to parse everything as text anyway

Does it at least integrate with DBus a bit?

Bash + coreutils/busybox/etc are everywhere, I can take them for granted. I will have to jump through hoops to deploy Powershell outside of Windows.

I also have no desire to use Powershell when I don't need to.

But they aren’t on windows, so they can’t be taken for granted there. You have to install git bash on windows.

What’s the difference between installing git bash on windows and installing powershell on Mac/Linux? I would argue that there is none.

And obviously it’s fine that you don’t want to use PowerShell, I don’t want to use it either. But personally I also dislike git bash on windows. It doesn’t feel like it belongs there, just like powershell doesn’t really belong on Linux/Mac.

If I had to write a build script for all three platforms I would just write them for their native environments. I wouldn’t be all that willing to add another tool to be installed just to save myself the effort of simple build script.

I can run an MSYS2 installer on a Windows VM once and be done with it. I will have to roll my own containers, for example, if I want to use Powershell elsewhere, versus just using vanilla or vendor-provided images.

For my use case, I don't see the need to bend my builds around Powershell just to use Powershell. This plays into my other point about not wanting to dig into Windows fundamentals when I don't need to.

> If I had to write a build script for all three platforms I would just write them for their native environments. I wouldn’t be all that willing to add another tool to be installed just to save myself the effort of simple build script.

This was my initial approach, but it became too much work to maintain separate build systems, especially when it came to making changes over time. One change becomes three, along with three new opportunities for things to break in three separate ways.

For what I'm doing, moving to Unix-y toolchains simplified builds and made it much easier to reason about it.

I totally get that your solution works for you and that is fantastic. I’m only questioning the pure logic behind it when you strip away opinion/preferences.

You picking one OS that you’re okay with modifying but the other one you’re not. If we inversed that preference and said that I’m willing to modify my Linux containers but unwilling to install software on my Windows VM, the logic is the same.

By the way, Microsoft publishes Linux images that already have PowerShell pre-installed.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/insta...

So, technically, if your build scripts were 100% PowerShell you could have it where both Windows VMs and Linux docker images could be unmodified.

Since your build scripts sound overly complex, they could possibly benefit from a scripting language that’s got support for objects and object data pipelines, more advanced error handling, and more advanced object parsing than tools like sed and awk.

Just playing “devil’s advocate” here, the logic checks out.

>> What’s the difference between installing git bash on windows and installing powershell on Mac/Linux? I would argue that there is none.

Big, big difference. My Windows laptop is basically a terminal to the Linux development server. I can install anything (within reason) on Windows, can't install shit on the Linux server unless I beg the IT admin for days and eventually he just says "no". He did install the "mc" (Midnight Commander) utility on it though and made my life like 100x easier. If MC were bundled with git bash, that would be something I would cheer for.

And yeah, I use git bash too on Windows. For accessing the Linux shell through ssh when I remotely connect to the server and for convenience locally. Main workhorse are the "less" and "grep" utilities to examine logs. What am I goint to use otherwise, Notepad?

Just because you aren’t familiar with Windows commands doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Microsoft actually gives you SSH without the need to install git bash.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/tutorials...

grep on windows is Select-String

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...

More command on windows:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...

What will you use to view logs, Notepad? Well, you could use the #1 most popular text editor that Microsoft happens to develop, VSCode. Or a wide array of Windows GUI software that isn’t available on Linux, like Notepad++.

The fact that your IT department has those specific policies in place and is inflexible with your developers isn’t really relevant to this discussion. The truth is that if you wanted PowerShell on Linux it is trivial to install. Microsoft even publishes Linux images that already include PowerShell.

Powershell had potential, but it didn't pan out. It's annoying and very challenging to remember all the one-off flags.

With bash, you only need to learn 10 or 20 short commands and a few flag variants, over a gently long period of time. Then you're all set for 97% of cases likely to be encountered.

I just wrote a two line bash script to process some large csv files that Python/Pandas were taking far too long to process [0].

A lot of people (myself included) tend to underestimate the power of the heavily optimized GNU utilities and the ability to manipulate them with bash.

[0] It was two lines for readability. It could have easily been a single line.

This is the opposite of how I see it. There's really nothing universal about flags, especially short ones, in different random utilities (what's -n mean? -f? file, filter or force?). Whereas in Powershell since there actually is some standardization, your knowledge about what -WhatIf or -Verbose do is actually pretty leverageable. And more powerful with the ability set default parameters and so forth. And the discoverability and help in Powershell is also standardized.

So I get why unfamiliarity would make it not worth it to switch from whatever shell you prefer, but I don't think I can see your point about flags.

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