Windows PowerShell Blog

Hope MS is adding a GUI based on PowerShell to compete with Automator.

Maybe Automator can be replicated by Citrix Workflow Studio?

the marvel of powershell isn't an anti-unix thing. It has nothing to do with unix. We're delighted to have its capabilities in windows. Ok, unix has had a great shell for years - that hasn't been especially helpful if you need to manage windows. Now windows has a great shell - if concepts were adapted from unix, take it as a compliment. Various unix shells have borrowed from each other for decades - so what if windows' shell borrows some concepts and techniques, too? Don't take thus as powershell vs. Bash; take it as "is windows finally getting a good shell? Let's compare it to a known-good shell and see."

Then why is it named "powershell vs bash" uh ?

obviously the review is very short and mentions nothing special , actually. It doesn't mean powershell is bad, but the review definitely is! It looks more like a "let put something about powershell it'll fill our pages".

I especially like the fact that you can use objects, but, is it really useable. Dont know. Guy took the samples from the powershell demos.

What if you cannot have cmdlets from program to program? etc.

Hmmm... Not happy with this an article. The conclusion seems to side step the thrust of the article - Bash Vs Powershell. Definitely pulls its punches at the end.

Is calling Bash "plain" and then advocating the use of Python and Tcl/tk - for more complex cases - an admission that Bash now looks old?

At the very least - I'd say this article is a good short introduction to powershell, and Don Jones is right. Windows does finally have a good shell.

Besides... I'm looking forward to the eventual article - Powershell Vs Python.  ;->

Cheers,

  Rob Lancaster

>> In the past, a number of people in the Linux community have assumed they knew what we were doing and did comparisons based upon their assumptions.

For those who actually understand PowerShell or just makes them loose credibility.

Anyway, I'd be interested in seeing (no-follow) links to some of those, just for rubber-necking sake.

Rob>> I'm looking forward to the eventual article - Powershell Vs Python.  ;->

Those are my too favorite languages, but Python wins out.  Actually, PowerShell would beat Python by a nose, if and only if you could build real web apps with PowerShell...

Just because someone uses the words "noun1 vs noun2" does not mean "OMG FLAME WAR!".  Really, that's in the eye of the beholder.  In other words, flame wars are caused by war-like people.  But that is beside the point.

Point I wanted to make is that as a fellow 4DOS/4NT user from waaaay back, sure I can sympathize with the comment "Windows should've had this all along".  From what I understand from talking to Jeffrey about this, it was a political issue and most definitely not a technical issue.  People who...what's a polite way to say this...have not been in the workforce may not understand this concept.

That being said; PowerShell is here and it's here to stay.  It knocks the socks off of cmd.exe and vbscript and apples-to-apples I think no other _shell_  comes close to its usability and functionality.  When you change that comparison to "scripting language", you are looking at a different thing and the pros and cons and applicability become more complex.  Even so, I think Jeffrey and his team have created a new model (OO scripting lang+shell) which sets the new bar for everyone else to plagiarize.  :)  Case in point--http://pash.sf.net.

I live under a rock, and generate my own electricity by catching electric eels in a bottle; I tell you this so you'll understand why I only just installed PowerShell tonight. It's wonderful.

As a newbie, I found the bash v. ps article helpful, mostly because I'm familiar with bash and wanted some way to get oriented to the new shell. Was the article incomplete? Sure. Was it biased toward PowerShell? Maybe, but that's not important to me.

Thanks for pointing out the article

Bash: commands are there, they tend to increase by time with adding of many applications etc. There's a sense of continuity.

Commands are compact e.g. ls, mv, rm etc. This favours speed

Colours are utilised in bash, bash is case sensitive for greater varitiety

PowerShell: This concept is muffled with the developement e.g. commands like dir/w, deltree, etc. So - personally - the sense of continuity between MS-DOS and PowerShell is weaker than various bash shells

Commands are more in a sentence structure verb-noun: e.g. Get-Item. This favours linguistic coherence. Alias is a compromise for covering this gap.

Colours are not utilised (not to my knowledge), PowerShell is not case sensitive for ease of usel

It's a shame Microsoft didn't incorporate what they wanted to achieve with Powershell into an existing cross-platform scripting language such as Perl or Python - at least that way we wouldn't have to learn a new language.

For the time being I'll stick to Perl & Python.

I am looking to replace Cygwin Bash scripting with powershell scripts. The key issue for me is one of performance.... should I assume that for the same types of operation powershell should be faster?

A simple example might be to extract all the source module names and defined routines in those libraries and store them as an XML file.

Regards

Carl

I find this comparison a little weird.

PowerShell seems to be a fully-fledged scripting language, comparable to Python (since it loads objects from different other applications) more than to bash, even though "PS" and "Bash" are both named "shells".

PowerShell doesn't seem to do things simply like bash does. You *need* to learn a whole new scripting language the moment you want to start using pipes and building minimally complex scripts. The fact that bash *only* pipes raw data keeps it simple. When you want OOP, well use the great cross-platform and open source Python scripting language. Standard, with it's thousands of libraries, capable of connecting to loads of applications, to be extended in C, C++, you-name-it-language, and finally build real, fully fledged applications.

It seems to me that PowerShell does fill a hole for Windows admins, but that no Unix sys. admin knowing rudimentary bash and Python will envy.

My question is, having an awsome, well-known, cross-platform OOP languages like Python around, why start off with a new language ? Why multiply the knowledge required for people dealing with large Windows / Unix / Linux / Macs deployments ?

I dislike the way new Microsoftisms must always be introduced, separately from the rest of the world. I think this isn't truly building tomorrow's tech world.

"I dislike the way new Microsoftisms must always be introduced, separately from the rest of the world. I think this isn't truly building tomorrow's tech world."

Amen. We know that there's only one reason: money. These Microsoftisims of which you speak, they're a profit drive. Such is the way that they were on DOS for the longest time. They didn't want to upset those who used DOS from the beginning, despite the fact that other OS's were light years ahead of DOS.

So is the way that they create a new 'language'. They create it to hook people, let it drag behind (to keep it comfortable), then to catapult them ahead by light years. Remember VB vs VB.NET? Yeah, same idea.