Comment by tammer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tammer | Hacker News Reader

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Interesting - babarock is incredibly wrong from the windows perspective, but from the unix perspective entirely correct. (I work in IT and handle things on both sides.)

Comparatively, the recent and steadily increasing reliance on PS is evidence of microsoft's recognition of the utility of a shell for managing their more complex software.

On the other hand, the fact that PS doesn't have it's own readline yet (it's just a wrapper for the cripplingly ancient CMD) and its incredible lack of basic features (just try managing AD users in PowerShell - sure its easy once you've written your own custom script or mapped it to a web interface or something, but there's no built in equivalent for adduser or about a billion other basic UNIX commands).

It all depends on your perspective. I'm glad to see MS moving away from their decade of GUI dependence.

just try managing AD users in PowerShell - sure its easy once you've written your own custom script or mapped it to a web interface or something, but there's no built in equivalent for adduser or about a billion other basic UNIX commands

It's not that bad. Adding a new AD user is a built-in command. From the docs:

New-ADUser GlenJohn -OtherAttributes @{title="director";mail="glenjohn@fabrikam.com"}

I'm not a UNIX admin; maybe the adduser command is easier. But managing AD stuff in PS is pretty easy (especially if you have to do it in bulk).

me@my_server$ useradd -G director glenjohn

glenjohn@my_server$ vi .forward

:a

glenjohn@fabrikam.com

:wq

And there are at least a few other ways to do that. But you certainly don't have to be an admin to specify an alternate email address.

Have you used PowerShell ISE 3.0? Its user experience is better than the standard tools on *nix that I've used, and of course much better than the old powershell. You get very good autocompletion (similar to what you get in IDEs like Eclipse or Visual Studio), syntax highlighting, debugger, etc.

But you can't use things like git from ISE because it doesn't support interactive console apps...

Powershell isn't a wrapper for CMD. It's a separate interface for WMI, COM and .NET.

he's not talking about the powershell engine, he's talking about the frontend repl you interact with

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