I have used bash, zsh, ksh, and now powershell. I am by no means an expert on UNIX shells. I could get all my work done on any one of these. My main shell is Zsh with some oh-my-zsh plugins because I’m lazy. What can you do in powershell that you can’t do in any other shell? Also, does the shell you use even matter? Sorry if this is a dumb question.

  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubEnglish
    13·
    11 days ago

    The best reason to use PowerShell on Linux is if you are working in a mixed/complex environment, or think that you might pursue a career in enterprise IT and want to learn about working in mixed environments. With PowerShell you can remotely manage Windows systems without having to RDP into them, you can just open a remote PowerShell session and issue commands to the target machine.

    I’ve used this to do things like loop through a list of endpoint hostnames, open a session to each one and get an inventory of installed applications on that system and also flag any hosts that didn’t respond to the remote session and then spit out all the results in a .CSV, fully automatic. Run monthly or as needed.

    You can also interact with the Windows registry via .NET classes, which PowerShell understands natively because it is .NET. You can do this locally and remotely, which looks something like this:
    [Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey]::OpenRemoteBaseKey([Microsoft.Win32.RegistryHive]::LocalMachine, "<hostname>").OpenSubKey('<registry key path>').GetValue('<key value name>')
    So if you wanted to check if a particular registry key was set on a group of Windows machines, you could write a PowerShell script that could just do that for you with no interaction. It’s also possible to modify registry keys remotely with .SetValue('<key value name>'), so if you need to do that in bulk it’s very convenient.

    Basically PowerShell can take previously arduous and time-consuming Windows sysadmin tasks and make them scriptable. And not just Windows, anything and everything .NET can be easily managed via PowerShell.