In the comments section of a recent post I found out that Windows PowerShell had been ported to Linux. Had no clue it was a thing.
Went looking and found this old article attempting to explain why they did it. Not remotely interested in giving up Bash for PowerShell, but I thought it was interesting enough to share. The article seems to be from 2016.
I have never been more tempted to check the NSFW box, but I’ll leave it open for now unless a mod complains. :-D
I wouldn’t go that far
As much as I hate windows powershell is actually decent.
The problem is that on Linux it competes with bash and dozens of way better terminals.
I’ve been a Linux sysadmin for decades and Windows for the year 8 years or so. I started using Windows with an air of contempt, and still do. I hate myself for saying this, but Powershell is better than bash. Bash is very limited if you consider only bash. For bash to be useful you need the entire GNU suite with grep, cut, awk etc.
That’s like saying that your car is very limited because you need cylinders, spark plugs, oil filters…
Well yeah, you do and typically that comes with the car, just like grep comes with bash
But that’s almost never how a system is configured. The entire point is that bash, zsh, fish etc. can make use of those utilities. You don’t need bash trying to reinvent everything. You don’t want that. That’s why changing shells is generally painless and a strength, not a weakness.
But on windows it makes sense to have the stuff built in, because those utilities are not on windows.
Yes, that’s the point of the shell. It’s the glue for all the little tools.
So you’re saying Powershell doesn’t uphold Unix Philosophy and thus shouldn’t be used?
PowerShell actually does uphold the Linux philosophy pretty well. Most functions are in modules that can be imported, disabled or swapped out as appropriate.
PS looking good
We’re not talking terminals, though, are we? You can run pwsh in dozens of terminals. As a shell, it’s… Very decent.
I hate to say it, but powershell is better than bash.