Microsoft PowerShell Goes Open Source and Lands On Linux and Mac (pcworld.com) 400
Microsoft announced on Thursday that it is open sourcing PowerShell, its system administration, scripting, and configuration management tool that has been a default part of Windows for several years. The company says it will soon release PowerShell on Mac and Linux platforms. PCWorld reports: The company is also releasing alpha versions of PowerShell for Linux (specifically Ubuntu, Centos and Redhat) and Mac OS X. A new PowerShell GitHub page gives people the ability to download binaries of the software, as well as access to the app's source code. PowerShell on Linux and Mac will let people who have already built proficiency with Microsoft's scripting language take those skills and bring them to new platforms. Meanwhile, people who are used to working on those platforms will have access to a new and very powerful tool for getting work done. It's part of Microsoft's ongoing moves to open up products that the company has previously kept locked to platforms that it owned. The company's open sourcing of its .NET programming frameworks in 2014 paved the way for this launch, by making the building blocks of PowerShell available on Linux and OS X. By making PowerShell available on Linux, Microsoft has taken the skills of Windows administrators who are already used to the software, and made them more marketable. It has also made it possible for hardcore Linux users to get access to an additional set of tools that they can use to manage a variety of systems.
Heu.. ???? (Score:5, Insightful)
Embrace, extend and extinguish ???
Link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Heu.. ???? (Score:5, Interesting)
Umm, desktop systems and apps may not be the growth business they once were, but they still make Microsoft billions. It's not that they want out of those businesses - it's that they're trying to keep up with the overall industry move to the cloud. Not that it would be a bad idea for Microsoft to start basing their cloud operations on Linux - assuming they could get more out of their hardware that way. Maybe they really are thinking along those lines, and want their software to work there - for their own purposes. That'd be pretty forward-looking.
Of course, Occam's Razor would favor locking admins into their Windows-specific toolset as the explanation...
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I agree. I think MS is slowly abdicating development to *nix/FOSS so they can get it off their plate. They don't want to develop standalone software products anymore, they want to move everything to SaaS and more or less follow IBM's footsteps. But it'll take at least a decade, especially to get their enterprise customers (who are the only ones MS understands and cares about) on board for that transition. I bet in a few years we'll see OEMs actually be more allowed to preinstall other OSes. There may n
Re: Heu.. ???? (Score:2)
Though if it's open source, it's hard to take it away so the extinguish part may not be possible. It really depends on the license.
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MIT License
https://github.com/PowerShell/... [github.com]
Re:Heu.. ???? (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Well, yes, but not in the way you think.
This isn't about Microsoft trying to "conquer" Linux. Increasingly Microsoft is less interested in maintaining operating system dominance. The OS is not a growth market, and not one that people really care too much about; they use whatever their computer (or device) comes with. Instead, Microsoft is betting big on becoming an OS-agnostic software-as-a-service company. That isn't to say that they are entirely abandoning Windows (and knowing Microsoft's legendary inter-departmental rivalries, you can bet the Windows team is fighting the rest of the company to keep their product relevant) but long-term I wouldn't be surprised to see all of Microsoft's products available on Linux, MacOS, IOS, Android and any other OS they can reach. It - not Windows dominance - is where Microsoft believes the company's future is.
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Ugh, PS is horrendous - especially trying to learn the f***ed up way it works.
But on Windoze hosts you have nothing else command line wise to manage AD and Exchange (mostly what I punish my self with).
It's object oriented. If you don't have a even a basic understanding of how objects work, of course it's going to be confusing. Once you break past that wall however, you find a well documented and sane terminal. Sadly many think "different" = "bad".
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I understand how objects work, I still don't like PowerShell.
Re:Heu.. ???? (Score:5, Interesting)
What I particularly dislike is how it automatically filters output, and you have to use arguments or other applets to give you fuller output. It just strikes me as being the exact opposite of how any particular command or script should work.
And objects, big fucking deal. I've been using Bourne variants for a quarter of a century and never thought "Boy, I wish I had classes".
Re:Heu.. ???? (Score:5, Insightful)
After 20 years of MS trying to kill the shell, they relented and decided the Windows platform needed one. But in typical MS style, they asked themselves "How can we make a shell that's notably different from everything else that already works?" and someone piped up "OOP is the Way of Everything." Welcome to another episode of Redmond: Not Invented Here Syndrome.
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Now that I've figured out object orient programming, exception handling, type def
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After 20 years of MS trying to kill the shell, they relented and decided the Windows platform needed one.
What on Earth gave you the impression that Microsoft had been trying to kill the shell?
For over 20 years they have made improvements to scripting from COMMAND.COM to CMD.EXE when we all moved to Windows NT. They added the Windows Scripting Host in 1999 with a large number of languages supported. Ten years ago they came out with PowerShell, which they have implemented as a central component so that some of the configuration programs are simply just a front-end to PowerShell (to teach people the scripting way
Articles about PowerShell (Score:3)
What I Hate About PowerShell [helgeklein.com]
Is PowerShell really this bad? [reddit.com]. Quote: "... the strangest mashup of Perl and VAX/VMS I've ever seen." Another quote: "... one of the most ass-backwards, lipstick on a pig, polished turd add-ons to the Microsoft stack in recent years."
Why Microsoft doesn't fix the long file name issues in PowerShell: Long Paths in
And don't forget the very poor writing quality of the documentation.
Re:Heu.. ???? (Score:5, Informative)
And objects, big fucking deal. I've been using Bourne variants for a quarter of a century and never thought "Boy, I wish I had classes".
You never wished for an object-oriented shell because you are already proficient in Unix shells, and it is clear you have only ever tried to make PS fit the Unix paradigm.
What I particularly dislike is how it automatically filters output, and you have to use arguments or other applets to give you fuller output.
Only the view in the console window is filtered by default. If you send the pipeline to a csv or xml, you'll get everything. It filters the console view because there is far more and more complex data being send along. It is not Unix, the pipeline is not compose of flat lines of text.
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I don't want the results filtered even on stdio to a command window. Yes I know they're not filtered if redirected to some other stream, but the fact that it filters it for the command prompt is absurd, and often renders the output useless unless you throw in the flag. How is "c:\somedir\someotherdir\importantf..." useful?
Re:Heu.. ???? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, I'm asking how is cutting off a path of a file (as an example of the kind of shortened output Powershell commands can produce) informative? And yes, I know it's fairly easy to overcome, but it just strikes me that this is the kind of GUI-centric thinking (this kind of output is straight out of a Listview object) that infects Powershell.
Re:Heu.. ???? (Score:4, Funny)
HAVE YOU NEVER HEARD OF CODE REUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUSE?!?!?!
Of course I have. Find code you want to re-use, copy it, and paste it into your new script. Code reused.
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It is SO "systemd". More of the binary is better bullshit.
Hint: computers work in binary. Computers are fast, users are slow. Letting the computer represent data in a manner that avoids conversions between external data to/from internal data avoids a lot of unnecessary computation. But then one have to convert between binary and text when communicating with users, right?
It isn't a problem given the extremely slow I/O speed of a human - conversion of a subset of data suitable for a screen takes very little computation power.
In a modern system binary _is_ better. Th
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"ls" is a great example. On unix, it's more or less impossible to take the output of ls, and break it apart into sane information, like file size and filename. As soon as you get spaces in filenames, you're shit out of luck.
Powershell is a brutally ugly thing to use, but the idea of piping information around that isn't just lines of text is great. I just don't think that it's been implemented well yet.
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PowerShell is a way to force Scripters to become .Net programmers.
There are many limitations and bugs with PowerShell commands and if you want it to work on all win boxes you need to use .Net stuff.
And when .Net won't do, use pinvoke
Re:Heu.. ???? (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, I love PowerShell.
I also love Perl.
In a lot of ways, the two are syntactically similar.
Being a long time Perl guy, I had no problem picking up PowerShell.
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ROLF! It is being used to manage tens of thousands of Exchange and SQL servers around the world. Yea, it must be flaky.
Careful your ignorance is showing.
Re: Heu.. ???? (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering how flaky exchange and SQL server is, that's no endorsement at all - after all, when the things it manages are utterly unreliable pieces of shit, whose going to NOTICE if the management tool also sucks ?
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Hmm... how were those servers managed before powershell?
Hint: I often encounter Exchange and SQL servers admins that don't even know about powershell, they are still using cmd.exe.
Admins: "Powershell? What is it? I would have to install it..."
Me: "see that rotated M icon on you taskbar, that's powershell..."
Admins: "Thanks! how does it work?"
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Hmm... how were those servers managed before powershell?
Hint: I often encounter Exchange and SQL servers admins that don't even know about powershell, they are still using cmd.exe.
Admins: "Powershell? What is it? I would have to install it..."
Me: "see that rotated M icon on you taskbar, that's powershell..."
Admins: "Thanks! how does it work?"
Those aren't Admins. Those are Microsoft Support Phone liaisons with elevated permissions. Thier job title may contain "Admin", but common sense screams otherwise.
Re: Heu.. ???? (Score:5, Interesting)
My brother is responsible to hire Windows admin at his university. Believe or not, he actually post looking for Unix admins! Based on previous experience, he says that if a guy can admin Unix, he will be better administering Windows then a Windows only admin.
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This has been true for decades. The forced familiarity with lower level tools such as DNS, DHCP, LDAP, or CIFS to manage services in a standards based and standards compliant way provides deeper knowledge and ability to fix issues than a typical Windows of equal experience brings to the task. Too much of Windows admin knowledge is often transient, learning specific button clicking interface patterns for certain tasks, with little review of _how_ things work or how the configuration data is stored The simple
Re: Heu.. ???? (Score:5, Informative)
Having administered Exchange from Exchange 97 to Exchange 2010, I can confirm that it's a pretty shaky system and can throw up some huge gotchas on occasion. It's also a bloated nightmare. I'm not sure if there's an upper limit to the resources that Exchange would gobble up.
Re: Heu.. ???? (Score:2)
The thing I hate about PowerShell is the fact that its command set is so damn enunciated. But on the plus side, it's object oriented so there are often much shorter ways of manipulating text that don't require some gnarly sed, awk, or grep command syntax.
Overall I think I'm starting to prefer PowerShell over bash, but it still has a few inconsistencies that are hard to get over, like how in a script you have to preface a regular command with an ampersand whereas doing the same thing in a regular interactive
Re:Heu.. ???? (Score:5, Insightful)
Overly verbose, syntactically complex, and most of all just astonishingly slow. I use it because there's no real alternative on Windows, but every time I have to code in PowerShell, I just think "So close to bash, but yet so far away." I cannot imagine anything that would compel me to use Powershell on a *nix system.
A sign of things to come. (Score:3)
It looks as though MS has finally accepted the inevitable.
Though I shudder to think what hell may follow with MS getting it's fingers in the FOSS Pie.
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The future for them is linux. There is no value in writing operating systems as we move to the cloud. The value is in charging monthly to host those systems and writing tools to use and manage those systems.
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Than Linux has won.:)
Re:A sign of things to come. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this is simple a smart move. You don't really have Linux admins saying, "Man, I wish I had Powershell!" as much as you have Windows admins saying, "I spent all this time making Powershell scripts. I wish I could run the same scripts on Linux." They're servicing their own users, and providing extra value in learning to use Microsoft technology.
This is the sort of thing that I used to think Microsoft was stupid for not doing.
Bash...powershell (Score:2, Insightful)
Bash...
Powershell...
Bash...
Powershell...
RIIIIGGGHHHTT!!!!
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That's what I don't get - what is the point of putting powershell on a unix box? Even if you have to administer Windows servers, I don't understand why you wouldn't just drop to bash (or whatever), ssh to the server and use powershell there. Why would you need powershell on the client?
I feel like I'm missing something...
It's not what I call a scripting language. (Score:3, Insightful)
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agreed. Coming from Solaris to Windows, I find it horrid, just horrid. Some days, I would give my server for a workable "grep".
pipe to: where {$_.property -match "regex"} Powershell has had a workable grep for a long time, but it's usually learning how objects work that typically obstruct new users.
Re:It's not what I call a scripting language. (Score:5, Funny)
agreed. Coming from Solaris to Windows, I find it horrid, just horrid. Some days, I would give my server for a workable "grep".
pipe to: where {$_.property -match "regex"}
Powershell has had a workable grep for a long time, but it's usually learning how objects work that typically obstruct new users.
Wow, that's elegant.
Re:It's not what I call a scripting language. (Score:4, Informative)
Wow, that's elegant.
Actually, depending on what was being piped, it could be simplified to:
But where the elegance lies is that the similar code would work for other conditions, beyond what grep could do. If you wanted to find all the long lines in a file, you would say:
Of course, if you use the scriptblock version with the { } characters, then you can do complicated expressions
This so-called non-elegant grep replacement can be used anytime you want to filter something. It doesn't have to be the contents of files or files themselves. Here I download the Slashdot.org homepage and find the link to the privacy statement:
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sls '<regex>' <files>
Re:It's not what I call a scripting language. (Score:4, Interesting)
Except Cygwin is even more bloated and slow than Powershell. I did actually work a lot with it about ten years ago, to the point where I even got a radius daemon compiled, but it was arduous and Cygwin can be a bit flaky. But really, the biggest problem is that it's slow.
who wants it? (Score:2)
Every once in a while I get told to run something under cmd.exe or PowerShell, and am reminded how incredibly limited these apps are when compared with any *nix *sh terminal app. Why does anyone think Linux users would take PowerShell over bash?
Re:who wants it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Every once in a while I get told to run something under cmd.exe or PowerShell, and am reminded how incredibly limited these apps are when compared with any *nix *sh terminal app. Why does anyone think Linux users would take PowerShell over bash?
For many, working with an object-oriented terminal is immensely more preferable to having to wrangle text.
Re:who wants it? (Score:4, Funny)
... For many ...
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
(best read in a pseudo-Spanish accent)
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You would need to have the objects first. On windows you have objects representing registry keys, services, users, installed packages, processes, scheduled tasks, shares, office documents, etc. etc. - Powershell gets the power from that. And in order to be similarly powerful on Linux, it would need to have bindings for all that on Linux. Somehow I doubt that.
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But with bash you can just start typing text. No need to look up obscure command system and object names if they only thing you want to do is get a list of all files matching a pattern. There's no text wrangling, you just start typing commands. And the same syntax you use for giving commands is used if you want a complicated script.
The difference is that Unix is oriented around commands and programs that take input and give output; whereas Windows is oriented around DLLs and frameworks that build on top
Re:who wants it? (Score:5, Informative)
But with bash you can just start typing text. No need to look up obscure command system and object names if they only thing you want to do is get a list of all files matching a pattern. There's no text wrangling, you just start typing commands. And the same syntax you use for giving commands is used if you want a complicated script.
The difference is that Unix is oriented around commands and programs that take input and give output; whereas Windows is oriented around DLLs and frameworks that build on top of DLLs.
So dealing with those DLLs from a scripting language is very powerful, but those are inherently complex operations. The learning curve is like a brick wall. Unix builds on combining very simple operations into more complex results. If you only use powershell twice a year you'll forever be stumped and lost, but if you use bash only twice a year you'll still be able to get stuff done.
As someone who uses bash twice a month (red hat and ubuntu), finding some of the commands, or the correct syntax/switches frequently tends to be a frustrating experience. The man pages are occasionally helpful, but they're just as often a novel on something that's inapplicable, and missing the data I really need. That means a trip to google, and ending up on a blog page.
When I compare that to the documentation in powershell, man seems like an empty water bottle, and powershell's Get-Help is a river. I can Get-Help -examples to skip directly to syntax examples, and I'm moved on to the next step before I've gotten half-way through a man document that *may* or may-not help me. Also, the naming of commands in powershell is *predictable* which is a *huge* help. Get-Command Get-* will return all the available commands for retrieving information, and Set- * for setting whichever.
You can typically *guess* what a command does, just by looking at it. How frequently can you say the same for linux?
Learning *either* can be like a brick wall, depending on what that person has already learned, but I see powershell's documentation and the obviousness of it's command names lends itself to faster learning, including among a couple of linux admins I taught a little powershell to. They still prefer the bash terminal, but I see the fluency of their powershell scripts jumping when they use it every few months.
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But with bash you can just start typing text. No need to look up obscure command system and object names if they only thing you want to do is get a list of all files matching a pattern.
You must be one of those people who wonders why foreigners speak foreign languages when English is so much easier to learn! (Even our children can do it) Bash is not magically easier than PowerShell for someone who only uses it twice a year. In fact, I would say that PowerShell is easier because it has a lot of built-in aliases to make it familiar to *nix users.
Want to do a directory listing of all files matching a patter? Try ls *.txt. It will work in both bash and PowerShell. The arguments are different i
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Powershell has a very steep learning curve and IMHO lacks the end-user history of traditional unix shells.
That said... doing things like having most of your OS exposed through objects for inspection and manipulation, even cells in spreadsheets or network resources has value.
Yo
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Powershell has a very steep learning curve and IMHO lacks the end-user history of traditional unix shells. ...
The fact that it's so hard to do simple things makes it very difficult to add to your knowledge without reading a few books or taking some course on the subject, then using it daily in Windows admin work.
I always wish I knew more about using it, but... unless you're deep in this stuff, it's better to skim the capabilities and let the Windows admins figure out the details.
What you need is a user community. When I started out in powershell, I was pretty lost myself. I've progressed quite a distance because I found a community willing to help me understand when I was fighting the derpsauce. Find one that fits you, wether it's a mailing list, slack channel, or the like, and you'll find your progression accelerated.
Q and A Time: What can Powershell do... (Score:2)
What can Powershell do that BASH can't? Outside the Windows ecosphere, is there any use to this?
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Piping is really enhanced and customizable in Powershell compared to bash. It's really a nice feature. On linux, piping commands in bash are extremely limited. mostly because the command you pipe from cannot customize what data it is going to output to the command you pipe to.
As usual, Microsoft likes to integrate heavily whatever they are making, and it shows.
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Re:Q and A Time: What can Powershell do... (Score:4, Informative)
Ever heard of awk and sed? I've been doing complex manipulations of data using tools like this for most of my IT career. Christ, I used awk to transform weird variant field exports from a mainframe to CSV to be imported into an inventory system while the most complex shell language Microsoft offered was the MS-DOS 6 command.com.
Honestly I think some of the people bragging up Powershell never really used *nix at all, at least not in any sophisticated way.
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Why would I need regex for that in something like awk?
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And more to the point, I think you misread the example I used. The END PRODUCT was a fixed-record CSV file to be imported into an inventory system. The initial data was a pretty weird mainframe format distributed by CDROM way back in the day, which had fixed-length records, but variant field counts depending on the inventory item in question. You first had to parse each line to sort out how many fields were in the record, then process them to create a CSV file. CSV was used simply because the inventory soft
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On linux, piping commands in bash are extremely limited. mostly because the command you pipe from cannot customize what data it is going to output to the command you pipe to.
Why exactly should it be able to customize output based on the pipe target? It sounds like something that makes commands work only with some specific other commands, seriously limiting reusability.
Yeah, almost everything that's genuinely useful limits reusability somewhat. By your logic, OOP "limits reusability" compared to raw assembly language, which allows you to do more things, including implementing your own OOP language in it. In reality, OOP tries to hit a sweet spot by constraining reusability somewhat and gaining functionality and ease of reusability for it. I've never used PS, but I understand that using object streams instead of text line streams will provide advantages. If the processes o
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Bash is good for a few commands. But for complex tasks, you need a decent programming language and Bash is severely lacking in that area. Powershell has a good programming language.
Another alternative, that is also a powershell competitor, is Xonsh, which is Python-based.
https://developers.slashdot.or... [slashdot.org]
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There's no easy way to get Powershell scripts to run in the task scheduler. At the end of my little quest, more than a few recommendations basically amounted to run it as "powershell.exe -File script.ps". Powershell still isn't really integrated into Windows, for goodness sake.
How does it compare? (Score:2)
So, anyone with real experience want to weigh in on how Powershell compares to the Linux command line? I've only used it a bit, and nothing has really jumped out at me as more than an incremental improvement over (pseudo-) DOS. Basically - is this something that might actually be valuable to -nix admins, or is it just a way for Windows admins to leverage their existing skills when managing -nix systems?
Either way I'm kind of surprised Microsoft is doing this - seems like the biggest effect would be to mak
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I really don't see much use for PowerShell on Linux -- maybe some portability reasons for lazy Windows admins. More likely this is just some token thing for Microsoft to open source for publicity, but won't lose them any sales.
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Re:How does it compare? (Score:4, Informative)
Powershell can be really powerful. Everything is a object and it allows you to easily write your own cmdlets and modules to extend the shell. No more parsing the text output of one command to create input to another. It's really very slick.
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Ever heard of #!/bin/sh ...
You've been able to create sh scripts for decades, if you wanted to construct specific reusable scripts that invoked the toolkit in some specific way.
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"Parsing"? What other tools have you been using?
And the fact that everything is an object is not very helpful unless there is consistent polymorphism and iterability.
As to easily extend the shell, you might have heard something like this:
"This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface."
This philosophy was first written down in 1978. Good of Microsoft to finally start c
Re:How does it compare? (Score:5, Interesting)
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If you'll wander over to the PowerShell Github repo [github.com], the readme does state that it is released under the MIT License. Of course, they bury that info at the very bottom of the page.
Want to be open minded BUT... (Score:2)
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Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy[sic] invent UNIX.
Have you forgotten Xenix?
bash (Score:2, Funny)
AWESOME! (Score:2)
Get-ChildItem -Recurse | Select-String 'hole_in_the_ground'
is sooooo soooo much better than
grep -r 'hole_in_the_ground'
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gci -recurse | sls 'hole_in_the_ground'
grep -r 'hold_in_the_ground'
Difference of about 10 characters.
Also... there is tab complete in PS just like in bash so....
Although, unlike in bash, tab completion also works for command line parameters as well so you wouldn't need to type all of "-Recurse" you would just need to type "-R" and then hit Tab once. so now the difference in keystrokes is fairly minimal.
44MB source code (Score:2)
ok seriously, does anyone else know of any shell that not only needs an entire framework install but also has 44MB of shit in it's source code?
Re:44MB source code (Score:5, Funny)
ok seriously, does anyone else know of any shell that not only needs an entire framework install but also has 44MB of shit in it's source code?
Well, you need to understand that unix-based versions of powershell are actually being implemented through emacs.
Azure, Exchange SQL et al (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason for doing this I thought would have been obvious, but from the comments it doesn't seem so.
No Linux admin, who administers standard Linux bare metal or VMs is going to install this, not in a million years, they've got bash scripts with GNU utils, or they learnt Python or Perl or something else years and years ago, they've no use for PowerShell...
If however, you use Azure (MS *are* the second largest cloud computing provider), and you want to do web scale, Microsoft either needs to start giving out Perl and or Python modules, or they need to get PowerShell on Mac / Linux for people to be able to script their Azure / SQL / Exchange instances so that the admins and devs can integrate with Chef and everything else out there.
With the amount of work that's gone into Powershell for it to be an admins platform, it's *easier* to port Powershell to Linux than what it is to rebuild powershell for Python or Perl or whatever else.
Good and Bad (Score:2)
Good because if it's truly open source, decent coders and groups can fork it, fix all the poorly designed and coded bugs...I mean 'features' it has.
Bad because...Microsoft, stay the hell away from Linux. MS makes everything it touches worse, introduced more bugs and security holes.
Oh boy (Score:2, Interesting)
Has anybody looked at the .net open source to confirm if Microsoft code is actually quality or just lucky shit that just runs? Do developers(including contractors) hired by Microsoft code better than Open Source people?
Stupid questions, but, I read somewhere that someone at MS stated they just push code that works but does not necessarily mean all the bugs have been worked out.
Preparation (Score:2)
This is probably something they are doing in preparation to bringing SQL Server (and maybe Exchange) to other platforms. There server apps tend to be managed using PowerShell
I want both worlds merged (Score:4, Interesting)
I want to run Powershell commands within a bash shell and be able to pipe their output to Unix utils, and I want to be able to run Unix utils in Powershell and pipe their output to Powershell commands.
I want to be able to mix and match them somehow.
Mostly, I think, the Powershell commands would be most useful paired with a bash shell and Unix utils, at least how I end up needing/wanting to use Powershell most of them time -- which I freely admit is biased by much more experience at a Bash prompt than a Powershell one, and mostly using Powershell commands to generate some kind of output that I want to work with Bash-style.
I recognize that merging them would be complex in some ways, as many Powershell commands return objects not output and the shell is just doing basic formatting of the object as textual output.
But maybe there could be some kind of hydbrid mode pipe operator that would just do the basic console output it would normally do, but send it to an instance of a Bash environment, or some way to access Powershell cmdlets from within bash as if they were normal programs that provided output.
Re:How much spyware is in it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Solutions to problems no one except windows admins are having. I don't think I'll lose much sleep.
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Patterns have a habit of repeating themselves. Assuming anything less is not a sustainable pattern.
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Microsoft stated their intentions to embrace open source, and they appear to be following through.
My sweet summer child, I used to be you. Bless your heart. Offering the benefit of the doubt is a noble and generous act.
History suggests that we should be vigilant and looking out for Microsoft trying to apply the 3E model again
Wait, so you know about this shit? You know they have a history of dishonesty and bad faith? I'm afraid I must now take a less charitable view of that first thing I quoted.
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The dotnet core dev tools have telemetry built in and you are automatically opted-in. It can be turned off, but in typical MS fashion they slid it past everyone hoping it wouldn't be noticed. It's perfectly rational to suppose that the PS port has telemetry reporting features in it. I would assume it does and so should everyone else.
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Do you have problems comprehending . . . people's facial expressions and moods?
In a text thread? Not at all.
Re:God Save us. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope -- they only ruin Lunix. The BSDs are doing fine.
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I guess then they're guilty for the Death of PC, since they own 90% of that market. This is a true genocide. 1.4 billion computers dead because of Microsoft.
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I felt a great disturbance in the Network, as though 1.4 billion OSes were crying out in pain.
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That's why we have zsh and fizsh with syntax highlighting and all that fun stuff and other interpreters like tcl.
I've used powershell. It's the first thing I install on a Windows system if it's not already there.
It's fucking awful. The only useful thing about it is that the two letter unix commands are aliased, so I don't get a dumb error when I type ls.
The syntax of powershell is un-fucking-readable. You can type it with tab completion and aliases, but man, Looking.At.AlltheObjects.LabeledThis.Way for m
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So throw in some perl.
Perl isn't very unixish though. It throws everything into one process. Arguably, PS is more unixish except that it has objects where Bash uses (lines of) text.
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Clearly PowerShell is intended to manage systemd.
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Powershell is horrible. It has some great stuff, don't get me wrong - the ease of using any .Net component from a script is interesting. But the haphazard nature of it means spending more time debugging and understanding obscure things about why it does things the way it does. I was using it for Azure scripting, but I've been burned so many times by it (and how crappy the Azure cmdlets are) that I've just gone to C# and .Net and the Azure REST APIs so I don't have to bend myself into contortions to do simple things and get deterministic results. Plus I can take advantage of things like generics, the TPL and collections in general which make my life a lot easier and more productive.
I can see using .Net core and C# on Mac or Linux. Powershell - no way.
This is a problem with any language, you can have bad implementation anywhere. Even within Microsoft you can see different teams have different levels of buy-in with powershell. The core cmdlets have a level of polish that isn't frequently seen elsewhere, but many of the other teams have made a decent effort to support powershell with modules that cover a large number of use cases.
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This is Microsoft we're talking about here. Obviously, they mean to do harm with this action. What is it? They have a long track record of actions that *seem* great but turn out to have a harmful outcome (harmful to us, beneficial to themselves) years later. Does the hivemind see what this angle is? I'm not seeing it, but you KNOW it's there. This is a company that does NOT do altruism. Anything smacking of doing good for outsiders with no shareholder return would get vetoed immediately by the MBAs in management.
The new management means this is a very different Microsoft then the ones we've seen over the past decades. Yes, Decades. Most (if not all) of the anti-trust stuff is over 15 years old now. And no company that large EVER does altruism, Microsoft is not the anomaly you're trying to paint it as.
The most obvious purpose of this move is that which is stated on Jeff Snover's blogpost, to enable the powershell fluent to be able to use that knowledge on more machines.
Powershell has been primarily a language of
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