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Comment by szszrk | Hacker News Reader

I know PowerShell is surrounded with polarized opinions, but that's one of the things it's amazing for. Import-Csv with Out-GridView gives nice results and it can be just a one-liner wrote from memory.

Just a reminder that it's possible and often built into our work environments, while we pretend it's not there.

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Pwsh is actually pretty good.

My hottest of takes...Powershell is the easiest way to write consistent scripts across the big three OSes.

PowerShell is the first thing I install on my Linux workstation/jump host because of those built-in Import/Export/Convertto goodies. Import-Excel module works on Linux too. Too bad the Invoke-WebRequest uses basic parsing only, it used to parse the actual DOM with JS and all, but I guess that was a security issue.

Nah, that required IE which isn't available on Linux.

Does it write UTF16 on linux too? That's my biggest gripe with powershell redirections and Out-File's on windows.

In `pwsh` (that's the xplat version of powershell, v7+), default encoding for Out-File is `utf8noBOM`.

install tabview?..

I have a simultaneous respect for the power and capabilities of PowerShell while also for some reason harbouring a very strong loathing of it. I just viscerally dislike it. Maybe it’s the syntax… or perhaps just some latent decades-old Windows admin trauma…

I guess there is consensus that powershell is good. Unix people may still find in cumbersome. For windows-primary people maybe it came too late? For a longer while it wasn't even integral part of Windows.

But honestly often when I talk to people they don't know the basics of cmd.exe, even if they worked with it for years. Like... surprised that it has pipes :) And apparently it's been there since DOS 2.0 (early 1980's).

Good point about it coming too late. I grew up using Windows pre-powershell and then had switched to Macs by the time Powershell got a lot of improvements and became a lot more worthy of attention!

I don't use Windows as my daily driver, so I had no idea Import-Csv existed until last week, when I pasted a shell command that I had run on my Mac, and asked it to write something that would work for Windows (for my colleague).

I hadn't understood how different Powershell is, compared with cmd.exe of old.

They should really have called it PowerScript. It's the full blown .NET ecosystem.

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