This is awesome! Props for going the extra mile and including things that people who doing quick bash-to-PowerShell ports tend to leave out- like pipeline input and SecureString. Here is the rare "Show HN" thing that I'm going to start using right away.
It's amazing how things change, sometimes so fast. PowerShell and not just cross-platform but open source too. Two-year ago me would've assumed this was an oddly timed April fool's joke.
this is super cool. One big struggle I had transitioning from OS X to Linux was 1password. I ended up using wine with the windows version which was awkward. I love CLI's to this may be a nice solution. Thanks!
Linux has had PowerShell support for a few weeks now, and if you look in the lib.ps1, you'll see that ClipboardCopy function tries clip.exe (Windows), then pbcopy (MacOS), then finally xclip (Linux).
The module author used good form in dividing things up between the functions (cmdlets) that user should call from the PowerShell commandline and shouldn't change (1Poshword.psm1) and helper functions whose names are subject to change if he ever rewrites something (lib.ps1).
OP here. The open-sourcing and cross-platformizing of powershell itself makes it about 99% free to create "cross-platform" projects. A few specifics I came across from the remaining 1%:
- Use platform-appropriate native tools (e.g. clip.exe/pbcopy/xclip as mentioned)
- Use appropriate path separators (tip: just use / always - Windows handles it fine)
- Be mindful of case-sensitive file paths
- Use platform-appropriate newline (fixed a bug here just this morning)
- Avoid BOMs when writing files, unix doesn't like them (use [IO.File]::WriteAllText, not Out-File. Sad.)
- Need to restrict yourself to powershell cmdlets and .NET APIs that are available in the open-source version of powershell
Thanks for the heads up, I didn't know about unicode problems in clip.exe. Do you have a link?
Set-Clipboard exists in full Windows Powershell, but not in Powershell "core" (open source version). I also didn't find a clipboard API in the current .NET core. So I went with native tools for now, and clip.exe is the only built-in option for Windows. If/when there is better xplat clipboard support in .NET or Powershell core I'll definitely move to that. Another option would be to check if Set-Clipboard exists and use it if so.
Sorry, it's not clip that has problems with Unicode, but rather PowerShell when piping to native commands. I should have remembered that fact.
One can set $OutputEncoding to UTF16LE to make things work. In that case, clip has no problems with Unicode, but by default PowerShell will use CP1252 when piping data to native programs. Maybe the variable can be set differently only for your module.
