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Comment by ballard | Hacker News Reader

Choose one of my adventures:

- Deploying a financial app through 4 bastion hosts by keeping Russian doll ssh tunnels up (clients outsource IT bouncing across the world to get to the right boxes)

- porting a 8 MLoC fortran nuclear reactor simulator from UNIX to windows

- generating PowerShell on Linux to be run on a windows box by reverse engineering the MS Api.

- silencing dialog boxes by DLLs which patch and proxy system DLLs

- making Java JRE run from a CD-ROM with the right JNI dll/so and a custom installer I wrote, before the advent of installanywhere (talking Java 1.1 days)

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>- generating PowerShell on Linux to be run on a windows box by reverse engineering the MS Api.

Sorry but my god, WHY? was it morbid curiosity, because I can see why you would like to do it then or do you actually prefer the power shell syntax? (sorry if this comes off as biased, and it may very well be but I haven't actually heard of many people that can stand powershell)

I'm definitely a *nix guy (run Linux and OS X, only, for the last 5 years or so) nowadays, but I've had to use PowerShell to do some admin stuff at work... and it's not that bad. Sure beats the crap out of Batch files anyway, though it's IMO not as good at gluing disperate processes together as Sh is. That however seemed more like a function of Windows' apps themselves more than PowerShell, though.

Most of my coworkers (sys admin-types) adore Powershell.

It's ugly in its own unique way, but it's better than bash in terms of functionality and elegance.

> better than bash in terms of functionality and elegance.

How so? I haven't used it much, but I've not noticed any elegance to it? is it like lisp and if I use it for a while it will hit me what the power of it is?

Much of the functionality stems from being able to use .NET objects in the scripts, and that the result of commands are objects rather than text. For example you can pass the output of ls to a foreach loop that outputs either the absolute or relative path of each file, or various other file properties like size or modification date.

You do have to be careful in some cases because UNIX style syntax is supported but the result may be different because of the underlying implementation. Like if you output text to a file using redirection, by default the output is UTF-16. It can make you crazy if you're not aware of things like that.

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