with the added twist that us poor *nix bods - looked down on for years - suddenly leapfrog the seasoned windows admins (who have said more than once that it's unfair) who ran a mile from the CLI.

Almost everything you want to do in Windows Admin is now done with a PSE of some sort.

It's clumsy, slow, and with an ugly syntax.

It's clumsy, slow, and with an ugly syntax.

So, a recipe for success at the MBA level decision tree then. No wonder we are all suffering.

MBAs are members of the mangaerialist class, how dare you criticise them, do you even know how much it costs their parents to enroll them on those MBA courses!!?!

Of course we don't. But unless there's an easily reusable KPI formula for it in one of their college course books, neither do they.

So I started out with Windows, then moved away to Linux, and now where I am while I use Linux 100% of the time but I need to provide support to Windows machines. Most of the time the PowerShell is helpful in doing that.

I think you are right that the syntax isn't great. It feels, sometimes to me, that commands given are like a weird pirate copy of the usual DOS prompt you used to get with Windows. It doesn't feel that intuitive compared to the language you use on the Linux CLI.

But it's miles ahead of what was possible with DOS, and the fact that even with it's ugliness it allows us to actually do things in Windows now. And that makes it rather pretty.

There hasn't been a DOS prompt in Windows since Windows ME. There is CMD.EXE, which supports DOS commands.

Isn't there a 'pedant' icon? Why yes, yes there is!

Is that the one with an inverted triangle, black and furry, like a minge ?

(you need to be an old-timer to get this)

Bring back DCL.

Compared to Powershell it was pretty good.

From one old timer to another - have an upvote. And a beer.

Anyone remember JCL, the language where comments are significant (shudder)?

If you mean [1]this JCL , it's still very much alive.

I'm not sure what you mean by significant comments, but if you use JES3, the control statements begin with //* - the same characters that introduce a JCL comment - which means you can't include JCL comments that begin with any of the JES3 commands in your virtual card deck. You'll be pleased to know that JES3 is on its way out, though JCL seems here to stay indefinitely.

[1] https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.1.0?topic=mvs-zos-jcl-reference

JES3 is now supported and enhanced by [1]Phoenix Software .

[1] https://phoenixsoftware.com/jes3plus.htm

Been over 20 years since I was near JCL so don't have any well formed memories, but it sounds more like it doesn't actually have "comments" but just ignores control statements that don't have a valid command ... so you could perhaps standardise on something like

//* COMMENT: actual comment text

Bring back DCL.

I still have the manuals. I keep them handy on a low shelf in case I need to reach a higher shelf.

IMHO, Powershell's "ugly" comes from the fact that, on the surface, large portions of it look like "programming" as opposed to "scripting". But once you get down into the nitty-gritty, the facade falls away, and it's just scripting, or perhaps "scripting++", since MS did a pretty good job of pre-canning a lot of simple functionality for us (sorting, searching, reading/writing files, etc) that makes the old DOS prompt look absolutely spartan. I'm still doing about 40% batch files and 60% powershell - some things ARE still easier to do in a batch file, especially where there's an existing utility (Robocopy, icacls, etc) that does most of the heavy lifting.

In comparison to UNIX that may be so (I demur about it being slow as I don't know). But Powershell for Windows is very good indeed, it's very useful.

I can imagine the people who demoted him sitting around nursing their right click muscle memory while drinking their decaffs... but but but he's making it more like UNIX. Isn't the whole point of Windows to have a window? Sip. More gluten-free biscuits, anyone?

Agree BUT it's light years ahead of DOS batch and in certain areas, ahead of *nix scripting and even things like Python. Try working natively with JSON or XML files in DOS batch or *nix script without any extra utils, can't be done. Work with ZIP files without a ZIP util on hand, PoSH wil do that natively.

I find PoSH to be almost like SQL ( I was a DBA for 20 years ) , you must always be aware of the size and structure of what's coming down the pipe, if it's in the wrong format or too big, go back and keep the pipeline flow "lean, mean and clean".

I see so many PoSH noobs making the mistake of chucking bucket loads of crap down the PoSH pipe and then moaning it's complete rubbish, no you simply need to undertstand it better to make it dance.

The essence of the Unix approach is that the shell provides the control structures with very few builtins. All the heavy lifting is done by other programs; that puts them all on an equal footing, including any you might care to provide yourself.

My understanding was that PowerShell syntax was designed to make it easier for Bash-heads to pick up PowerShell?

Ugly syntax for sure.

You'd think equals would be =

Nope. It's -eq

Greater than >

No. -gt

Meanwhile in Bourne shell...

if test "$x" -gt 9 -a "$y" -eq 10; then

And yes, this works in Bash.

You'd think equals would be =

Nope. I'd expect it to be an assignment.

Greater than >

Nope, I'd expect it to be a redirection of output.

The first is a universal issue in languages, differentiating between an equality test and an assignment. The latter isn't universal but it becomes an issue in a language that has to deal with redirecting data flows.

When it first came out, I would have agreed with you. In truth I avoided it for years because "cmd just worked" and "the syntax sucks" and "it makes no sense why they're doing this" and "it's slow as hell".

But then the versions continued to roll out, more modules got developed, the infrastructure got better, and speeds improved greatly. And now we have the largely open-source and multi-platform .NET Core and PowerShell Core, with perfectly acceptable performance and a bevy of useful features. Being able to easily script against .NET Framework/Core objects (or just straight up write in CLR languages and load them at runtime) is such a huge boon, especially when Windows is so tightly integrated with it. There essentially isn't anything you can't do with PowerShell on modern Windows, and it far outshines the capabilities and cruddy syntax of cmd.

Anyway, if you want to talk about bad syntax, let's honestly and objectively take a look at Bash, or really Bourne/POSIX shell in general, and all their ilk. You mean to tell me x="hello world"; echo "${var%world}" is self-evident without already knowing what it means? Or the fact that you can't put spaces around the = when assigning a variable, which has tripped up every newbie? Or the other hundred non-trivial hurdles you have to work around to make a good script? The grass is not always greener on the other side. Even in Windows-land, ask any veteran sysadmin and they will tell you every which way cmd syntax sucks, and how inflexible and error-prone it is; it even shares some of the problems that Bourne shell does, like assigning variables.

Fact of the matter is PowerShell is a hell of a lot more expressive than its competitors, even if the syntax is still a little wonky after all its revisions. I'd take it over cmd any day, and if I didn't know anything about *nix shell and weren't already used to it, I would probably take it on Linux too.

I've never really used Windows for anything serious (my history is RSX->VMS->Linux, when not working on embedded systems) but I am impressed with Powershell for its ability to work with objects and collections as basic building blocks.

The ability to pipe around objects, instead of just character streams, along with primitives to allow constructs like "for each" and "case" switching based on class in a standardised way would be very useful improvements to bash.

..plus you can call into .NET assemblies. We've used it to knock up test harnesses and to write simple utilities to support our .NET applications. Sometimes it's quicker than writing yet another .NET application.

There are times it can thwart though. At a recent meeting we got stuck trying to get the value of a variable passed to an external application. We could echo it to the screen but couldn't figure out how to get it expanded in a command line. It being the end of the day was probably a factor in that but it's a pretty trivial thing to have defeated half a dozen software developers.

"It's clumsy, slow, and with an ugly syntax."

It's all of that with inconsistent switches from command to command and version to version.

It also allows MS to stop developing GUI. Why right click and select an option when you can type a 400+ character PS command that can bork your domain instantly.

When on earth will they come up with an equivalent of du?

full file system and you want to find the culprit in *nix

ls /some/dir | while read line

do

du -sh $line

done

I once found the code in powershell but it was so ugly I couldn't deal with it. It is good to have powercli on linux though so I can take snapshots etc. So, on balance I suppose it is a good thing.

du -sh /some/dir/* | sort -h

Powershells not tooooo much more verbose, although I've omitted the sorting which I expect would add a fair bit. :)

Get-ChildItem c:\some\folder | ForEach-Object { Echo $_.Name ; Get-ChildItem -Recurse . | measure-object -property Length -sum }

Excellent example thank you. The brevity and elegance of Bash shines. And what are those bizarre PS constructs to the right of the pipe?

Never underestimate how easy it is to make "different" = "worse".

And PS uses autocomplete, so far less typing than you'd think.

Or, before you've run out of space, install tree.

"When on earth will they come up with an equivalent of du?"

I was just looking at this last week to find a way to log directory sizes on the file server. There is a du utility somewhere, maybe from SysInternals. But it turns out, to get the disk usage of really large directories, the "fastest" way to do it in Powershell is to use Robocopy (with the /L switch) and parse the output. Crazy as hell, yeah, but true. Takes like 8 lines of PS code and bazinga! Robocopy must have super-magical Jedi code in it because it hands-down beat the shit out of every other method I tried, by a large margin.

ncdu

Job control or Tmux is greatly needed for PowerShell.

Currently you need to open up multiple SSH sessions to the same Windows box like it is some sort of multi-user DOS from the 90s again.

One of the interesting parts of the thread was the total toxic culture due to a particular VP. It explains a lot and MS at the time, and I wonder whether the culture of stack ranking was part of it?

Certainly he seems to have a VP who was scared in upsetting his bosses, and was not willing to fight for their team. Basically a culture where innovation was frowned upon and discussion was stamped our.

It pretty well explains a lot of MS products at the time

How Microsoft operates internally reminds me of how Trump operates. If you are not making Windows look good then you are Fake News( bad for Microsoft and bad for Windows ). No doubt PS acted too much like the *nix commandline even if more in intent than execution. Linux is bad because it is not Windows and anything which validates something other than Windows makes Windows look bad. Trumpanze thinking and this thinking has been instilled in Microsoft management ever since their split from IBM.

and you'll go far is the moral of the story for VPs, GM's etc. I was a GM for a while, and couldn't shit on everybody, glad I got out.