Is PowerShell ready to replace my Cygwin shell on Windows? [closed]

Question

I'm debating whether I should learn PowerShell, or just stick with Cygwin/Perl scripts/Unix shell scripts, etc.

The benefit of PowerShell would be that the scripts could be more easily used by teammates that don't have Cygwin; however, I don't know if I'd really be writing that many general purpose scripts, or if people would even use them.

Unix scripting is so powerful, does PowerShell come close enough to warrant switching over?

Here are some of the specific things (or equivalents) I would be looking for in PowerShell:

• grep
• sort
• uniq
• Perl (how close does PowerShell come to Perl's capabilities?)
• AWK
• sed
• file (the command that gives file information)
• etc.

Answer 1

Tools are just tools.
They help or they don't.
You need help or you don't.

If you know Unix and those tools do what you need them to do on Windows - then you are a happy guy and there is no need to learn PowerShell (unless you want to explore).

My original intent was to include a set of Unix tools in Windows and be done with it (a number of us on the team have deep Unix backgrounds and a healthy dose of respect for that community.)

What I found was that this didn't really help much. The reason for that is that AWK/grep/sed don't work against COM, WMI, ADSI, the Registry, the certificate store, etc., etc.

In other words, UNIX is an entire ecosystem self-tuned around text files. As such, text processing tools are effectively management tools. Windows is a completely different ecosystem self-tuned around APIs and Objects. That's why we invented PowerShell.

What I think you'll find is that there will be lots of occasions when text-processing won't get you what you want on Windows. At that point, you'll want to pick up PowerShell. NOTE - it is not an all or nothing deal. Within PowerShell, you can call out to your Unix tools (and use their text process or PowerShell's text processing). Also you can call PowerShell from your Unix tools and get text.

Again - there is no religion here - our focus is on giving you the tools you need to succeed. That is why we are so passionate about feedback. Let us know where we are falling down on the job or where you don't have a tool you need and we'll put it on the list and get to it.

In all honesty, we are digging ourselves out of a 30-year-hole, so it is going to take a while. That said, if you pick up the beta of Windows Server 2008 /R2 and/or the betas of our server products, I think you'll be shocked at how quickly that hole is getting filled.

With regard to usage - we've had > 3.5 million downloads to date. That does not include the people using it in Windows Server 2008, because it is included as an optional component and does not need a download.

V2 will ship in all versions of Windows. It will be on-by-default for all editions except Server core where it is an optional component. Shortly after Windows 7/Windows Server 2008 R2 ships, we'll make V2 available on all platforms, Windows XP and above. In other words - your investment in learning will be applicable to a very large number of machines/environments.

One last comment. If/when you start to learn PowerShell, I think you'll be pretty happy. Much of the design is heavily influenced by our Unix backgrounds, so while we are quite different, you'll pick it up very quickly (after you get over cussing that it isn't Unix :-) ).

We know that people have a very limited budget for learning - that is why we are super hard-core about consistency. You are going to learn something, and then you'll use it over and over and over again.

Experiment! Enjoy! Engage!

Answer 2

grep

Select-String cmdlet and -match operator work with regexes. Also you can directly make use of .NET's regex support for more advanced functionality.

sort

Sort-Object is more powerful (than I remember *nix's sort). Allowing multi-level sorting on arbitrary expressions. Here PowerShell's maintenance of underlying type helps; e.g. a DateTime property will be sorted as a DateTime without having to ensure formatting into a sortable format.

uniq

Select-Object -Unique

Perl (how close does PowerShell come to Perl capabilities?)

In terms of Perl's breadth of domain specific support libraries: nowhere close (yet).

For general programming, PowerShell is certainly more cohesive and consistent, and easier to extend. The one gap for text munging is something equivalent to Perl's .. operator.

AWK

It has been long enough since using AWK (must be >18 years, since later I just used Perl), so can't really comment.

sed

[See above]

file (the command that gives file information)

PowerShell's strength here isn't so much of what it can do with filesystem objects (and it gets full information here, dir returns FileInfo or FolderInfo objects as appropriate) is that is the whole provider model.

You can treat the registry, certificate store, SQL Server, Internet Explorer's RSS cache, etc. as an object space navigable by the same cmdlets as the filesystem.

---

PowerShell is definitely the way forward on Windows. Microsoft has made it part of their requirements for future non-home products. Hence rich support in Exchange, support in SQL Server. This is only going to expand.

A recent example of this is the TFS PowerToys. Many TFS client operations are done without having to startup tf.exe each time (which requires a new TFS server connection, etc.) and is notably easier to then further process the data. As well as allowing wide access to the whole TFS client API to a greater detail than exposed in either Team Explorer of TF.exe.

Answer 3

As someone whose career focused on Windows enterprise development from 1997 - 2010, the obvious answer would be PowerShell for all the good reasons given previously (e.g., it is part of Microsoft's enterprise strategy; it integrates well with Windows/COM/.NET; and using objects instead of files provides for a "richer" coding model). For that reason I'd been using and promoting PowerShell for the last two years or so, with the express belief I was following the "Word of Bill."

However, as a pragmatist I'm no longer sure PowerShell is such a great answer. While it's an excellent Windows tool and provides a much needed step towards filling the historic hole that is the Window command line, as we all watch Microsoft's grip on consumer computing slip it seems increasingly likely that Microsoft has a massive battle ahead to keep its OS as important to the enterprise of the future.

Indeed, given I find my work is increasingly in heterogeneous environments, I'm finding it much more useful to use Bash scripts at the moment, as they not only work on Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X, but they also work—with the help of Cygwin—on Windows.

So if you buy into the belief that the future of the OS is commoditized rather than a monopolized, then it seems to make sense to opt for an agile development tool strategy that keeps away from proprietary tools where feasible. If however you see your future being dominated by all-that-is-Redmond then go for PowerShell.